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THE IDEA OF GOD AS AFFECTED 
BY MODERN KNOWLEDGE 



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By JOHN FISKE 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 






Copyright, 1885, 
By JOHN FISKE. 

All rights reserved. 



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To 
MY WIFE, 

IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE SWEET SUNDAY MORNING 

UNDER THE APPLE-TREE ON THE HILLSIDE, 

WHEN WE TWO SAT LOOKING DOWN INTO FAIRY WOODLAND PATHS, 

AND TALKED OF THE THINGS 

SINCE WRITTEN IN THIS LITTLE BOOK, 

I tio&J trctrtcate it. 



'Apyvptov Kat XP V<J,10V 0V X V7rapxet 
fAOf 6 Se exw, tovto crot Sificofu. 



•$ 



PREFACE. 




HEN asked to give a second ad- 
dress before the Concord School 
of Philosophy, I gladly accepted 
the invitation, as affording a proper occa- 
sion for saying certain things which I had 
for some time wished to say about theism. 
My address was designed to introduce the 
discussion of the question whether pan- 
theism is the legitimate outcome of mod- 
ern science. It seemed to me that the 
object might best be attained by passing 
in review the various modifications which 
the idea of God has undergone in the past, 
and pointing out the shape in which it is 
likely to survive the rapid growth of mod- 
ern knowledge, and especially the estab- 
lishment of that great doctrine of evolu- 
tion which is fast obliging us to revise 



vi Preface. 

our opinions upon all subjects whatsoever. 
Having thus in the text outlined the idea 
of God most likely to be conceived by- 
minds trained in the doctrine of evolution, 
I left it for further discussion to decide 
whether the term "pantheism" can prop- 
erly be applied to such a conception. 
While much enlightenment may be got 
from carefully describing the substance of 
a philosophic doctrine, very little can be 
gained by merely affixing to it a label ; 
and I could not but feel that my argument 
would be simply encumbered by the intro- 
duction of any question of nomenclature 
involving such a vague and uninstructive 
epithet as "pantheism." Such epithets 
are often regarded with favour and freely 
used, as seeming to obviate the necessity 
for that kind of labour to which most peo- 
ple are most averse, — the labour of sus- 
tained and accurate thinking. People are 
too apt to make such general terms do 
duty in place of a careful examination of 
facts, and are thus sometimes led to 



Preface. vii 

strange conclusions. When, for example, 
they have heard somebody called an " ag- 
nostic/' they at once think they know all 
about him ; whereas they have very likely 
learned nothing that is of the slightest 
value in characterizing his opinions or his 
mental attitude. A term that can be ap- 
plied at once to a Comte, a Mansel, and a 
Huxley is obviously of little use in the 
matter of definition. But, it may be asked, 
in spite of their world-wide differences, do 
not these three thinkers agree in holding 
that nothing can be known about the na- 
ture of God ? Perhaps so, — one cannot 
answer even this plain question with an 
unqualified yes ; but, granting that they 
fully agree in this assertion of ignorance, 
nevertheless, in their philosophic attitudes 
with regard to this ignorance, in the use 
they severally make of the assertion, in the 
way it determines their inferences about all 
manner of other things, the differences are 
so vast that nothing but mental confusion 
can come from a terminology which would 



viii Preface. 

content itself by applying to all three the 
common epithet "agnostic." The case is 
similar with such a word as " pantheism," 
which has been familiarly applied to so 
many utterly diverse systems of thought 
that it is very hard to tell just what it 
means. It has been equally applied to 
the doctrine of "the Hindu philosophers 
of the orthodox Brahmanical schools," who 
"hold that all finite existence is an illu- 
sion, and life mere vexation and mistake, 
a blunder or sorry jest of the Absolute ;" 
and to the doctrine of the Stoics, who 
" went to the other extreme, and held that 
the universe was the product of perfect 
reason and in an absolute sense good." 
(Pollock's "Spinoza," p. 356.) In recent 
times it has been commonly used as a 
vituperative epithet, and hurled indiscrimi- 
nately at such unpopular opinions as do 
not seem to call for so heavy a missile as 
the more cruel term "atheism." The 
writer who sets forth in plain scientific 
language a physical theory of the universe 



Preface. ix 

is liable to be scowled at and called an 
atheist ; but, when the very same ideas are 
presented in the form of oracular apoph- 
thegm or poetic rhapsody, the author is 
more gently described as " tinctured with 
pantheism." 

But out of the chaos of vagueness in 
which this unhappy word has been im- 
mersed it is perhaps still possible to ex- 
tract something like a definite meaning. 
In the broadest sense there are three pos- 
sible ways in which we may contemplate 
the universe. 

First 9 we may regard the world of phe- 
nomena as sufficient unto itself, and deny 
that it needs to be referred to any under- 
lying and all-comprehensive unity. Noth- 
ing has an ultimate origin or destiny ; 
there is no dramatic tendency in the suc- 
cession of events, nor any ultimate law to 
which everything must be referred ; there 
is no reasonableness in the universe save 
that with which human fancy unwarrant- 
ably endows it ; the events of the world 



x Preface. 

have no orderly progression like the scenes 
of a well-constructed plot, but in the man- 
ner of their coming and going they con- 
stitute simply what Chauncey Wright so 
aptly called "cosmical weather ;" they drift 
and eddy about in an utterly blind and 
irrational manner, though now and then 
evolving, as if by accident, temporary com- 
binations which have to us a rational ap- 
pearance. This is Atheism, pure and un- 
qualified. It recognizes no Omnipresent 
Energy. 

Secondly > we may hold that the world of 
phenomena is utterly unintelligible unless 
referred to an underlying and all-compre- 
hensive unity. All things are manifesta- 
tions of an Omnipresent Energy which 
cannot be in any imaginable sense per- 
sonal or anthropomorphic ; out from this 
eternal source of phenomena all individ- 
ualities proceed, and into it they must all 
ultimately return and be absorbed ; the 
events of the world have an orderly pro- 
gression, but not toward any goal recog- 



Preface. xi 

nizable by us ; in the process of evolution 
there is nothing that from any point of 
view can be called teleologicaT; the be- 
ginning and end of things — that which is 
Alpha and Omega — is merely an inscruta- 
ble essence, a formless void. Such a view 
as this may properly be called Pantheism. 
It recognizes an Omnipresent Energy, but 
virtually identifies it with the totality of 
things. 

Thirdly, we may hold that the world of 
phenomena is intelligible only when re- 
garded as the multiform manifestation of 
an Omnipresent Energy that is in some 
way — albeit in a way quite above our 
finite comprehension — anthropomorphic 
or quasi-personal. There is a true objec- 
tive reasonableness in the universe ; its 
events have an orderly progression, and, so 
far as those events are brought sufficiently 
within our ken for us to generalize them 
exhaustively, their progression is toward a 
goal that is recognizable by human intelli- 
gence ; " the process of evolution is itself 



xii Preface. 

the working out of a mighty Teleology of 
which our finite understandings can fathom 
but the scantiest rudiments " (" Cosmic 
Philosophy," vol. ii. p. 406) ; it is indeed 
but imperfectly that we can describe the 
dramatic tendency in the succession of 
events, but we can see enough to assure 
us of the fundamental fact that there is 
such a tendency ; and this tendency is the 
objective aspect of that which, when re- 
garded on its subjective side, we call Pur- 
pose. Such a theory of things is Theism. 
It recognizes an Omnipresent Energy, 
which is none other than the living God. 

It is this theistic doctrine which I hold 
myself, and which in the present essay I 
have sought to exhibit as the legitimate 
outcome of modern scientific thought. I 
was glad to have such an excellent occa- 
sion for returning to the subject as the 
invitation from Concord gave me, because 
in a former attempt to expound the same 
doctrine I do not seem to have succeeded 
in making myself understood. In my 



Preface. xiii 

"Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," pub- 
lished in 1874, I endeavoured to set forth 
a theory of theism identical with that 
which is set forth in the present essay. 
But an acute and learned friend, writing 
under the pseudonym of "Physicus," in 
his " Candid Examination of Theism " 
(London, 1878), thus criticizes my theory: 
In it, he says, " while I am able to discern 
the elements which I think may properly 
be regarded as common to Theism and to 
Atheism, I am not able to discern any 
single element that is specifically distinc- 
tive of Theism " (p. 145). The reason for 
the inability of " Physicus " to discern any 
such specifically distinctive element is that 
he misunderstands me as proposing to di- 
vest the theistic idea of every shred of 
anthropomorphism, while still calling it a 
theistic idea. This, he thinks, would be 
an utterly illegitimate proceeding, and I 
quite agree with him. In similar wise my 
friend Mr. Frederick Pollock, in his ad- 
mirable work on Spinoza (London, 1880), 



xiv Preface. 

observes that "Mr. Fiske's doctrine ex- 
cludes the belief in a so-called Personal 
God, and the particular forms of religious 
emotion dependent on it" (p. 356). If 
the first part of this sentence stood alone, 
I might pause to inquire how much lati- 
tude of meaning may be conveyed in the 
expression " so-called ; " is it meant that I 
exclude the belief in a Personal God as it 
was held by Augustine and Paley, or as it 
was held by Clement and Schleiermacher, 
or both ? But the second clause of the 
sentence seems to furnish the answer ; it 
seems to imply that I would practically do 
away with Theism altogether. 

Such a serious misstatement of my posi- 
tion, made in perfect good faith by two 
thinkers so conspicuous for ability and can- 
dour, shows that, in spite of all the elab- 
orate care with which the case was stated 
in "Cosmic Philosophy," some further ex- 
planation is needed. It is true that there 
are expressions in that work which, taken 
singly and by themselves, might seem to 



Preface. xv 

imply a total rejection of theism. Such 
expressions occur chiefly in the chapter en- 
titled " Anthropomorphic Theism," where 
great pains are taken to show the inade- 
quacy of the Paley argument from design, 
and to point out the insuperable difficul- 
ties in which we are entangled by the con- 
ception of a Personal God as it is held by 
the great majority of modern theologians 
who have derived it from Plato and Au- 
gustine. In the succeeding chapters, how- 
ever, it is expressly argued that the total 
elimination of anthropomorphism from the 
idea of God is impossible. There are some 
who, recognizing that the ideas of Person- 
ality and Infinity are unthitfk^le in com- 
bination, seek to escape the difficulty by 
speaking of God as the " Infinite Power ; " 
that is, instead of a symbol derived from 
our notion of human consciousness, they 
employ a symbol derived from our notion 
of force in general. For many philosophic 
purposes the device is eminently useful ; 
but it should not be forgotten that, while 



xvi Preface. 

the form of our experience of Personality 
does not allow us to conceive it as infinite, 
it is equally true that the form of our ex- 
perience of Force does not allow us to 
conceive it as infinite, since we know force 
only as antagonized by other force. Since, 
moreover, our notion of force is purely a 
generalization from our subjective sensa- 
tions of effort overcoming resistance, there 
is scarcely less anthropomorphism lurking 
in the phrase " Infinite Power " than in the 
phrase "Infinite Person. " Now in " Cos- 
mic Philosophy" I argue that the presence 
of God is the one all-pervading fact of life, 
from which there is no escape ; that while 
in the deepest sense the nature of Deity 
is unknowable by finite Man, nevertheless 
the exigencies of our thinking oblige us to 
symbolize that nature in some form that 
has a real meaning for us ; and that we 
cannot symbolize that nature as in any 
wise physical, but are bound to symbolize 
it as in some way psychical. I do not here 
repeat the arguments, but simply state the 



Preface. xvii 

conclusions. The final conclusion (vol. ii. 
p. 449) is that we must not say that " God 
is Force," since such a phrase inevitably 
calls up those pantheistic notions of blind 
necessity, which it is my express desire to 
avoid ; but, always bearing in mind the 
symbolic character of the words, we may 
say that "God is Spirit." How my belief 
in the personality of God could be more 
strongly expressed without entirely desert- 
ing the language of modern philosophy 
and taking refuge in pure mythology, I 
am unable to see. 

There are two points in the present 
essay which I hope will serve to define 
more completely the kind of theism which 
I have tried to present as compatible with 
the doctrine of evolution. One is the 
historic contrast between anthropomorphic 
and cosmic theism regarded in their modes 
of genesis, and especially as exemplified 
within the Christian church in the very 
different methods and results of Augustine 
on the one hand and Athanasius on the 



xviii Preface. 

other. The view which I have ventured 
to designate as "cosmic theism" is no in- 
vention of mine ; in its most essential fea- 
tures it has been entertained by some of 
the profoundest thinkers of Christendom 
in ancient and modern times, from Clem- 
ent of Alexandria to Lessing and Goethe 
and Schleiermacher. The other point is 
the teleological inference drawn from the 
argument of my first Concord address on 
" The Destiny of Man, viewed in the Light 
of his Origin." 

When that address was published, a 
year ago, I was surprised to find it quite 
commonly regarded as indicating some 
radical change of attitude on my part, — 
a " conversion," perhaps, from one set of 
opinions to another. Inasmuch as the 
argument in the " Destiny of Man" was 
based in every one of its parts upon argu- 
ments already published in " Cosmic Phi- 
losophy" (1874), and in the "Unseen 
World" (1876), I naturally could not 
understand why the later book should 



Preface. xix 

impress people so differently from the 
earlier ones. It presently appeared, how- 
ever, that none of my friends who had 
studied the earlier books had detected any 
such change of attitude ; it was only people 
who knew little or nothing about me, or 
else the newspapers. Whence the infer- 
ence seemed obvious that many readers 
of the " Destiny of Man " must have con- 
trasted it, not with my earlier books which 
they had not read, but with some vague 
and distorted notion about my views which 
had grown up (Heaven knows how or why !) 
through the medium of "the press ;" and 
thus there might have been produced the 
impression that those views had under- 
gone a radical change. 

It would be little to my credit, however, 
had my views of the doctrine of evolution 
and its implications undergone no develop- 
ment or enlargement since the publication 
of " Cosmic Philosophy/ ' To carry such a 
subject about in one's mind for ten years, 
without having any new thoughts about it, 



xx Preface, 

would hardly be a proof of fitness for phi- 
losophizing. I have for some time been 
aware of a shortcoming in the earlier work, 
which it is the purpose of these two Con- 
cord addresses in some measure to remedy. 
That shortcoming was an imperfect ap- 
preciation of the goal toward which the 
process of evolution is tending, and a con- 
sequent failure to state adequately how the 
doctrine of evolution must affect our esti- 
mate of Man's place in Nature. Nothing 
of fundamental importance in " Cosmic 
Philosophy" needed changing, but a new 
chapter needed to be written, in order to 
show how the doctrine of evolution, by 
exhibiting the development of the highest 
spiritual human qualities as the goal to- 
ward which God's creative work has from 
the outset been tending, replaces Man in 
his old position of headship in the uni- 
verse, even as in the days of Dante and 
Aquinas. That which the pre-Copernican 
astronomy naively thought to do by plac- 
ing the home of Man in the centre of 



Preface. xxi 

the physical universe, the Darwinian bi- 
ology profoundly accomplishes by exhibit- 
ing Man as the terminal fact in that stu- 
pendous process of evolution whereby 
things have come to be what they are. 
In the deepest sense it is as true as it ever 
was held to be, that the world was made 
for Man, and that the bringing forth in 
him of those qualities which we call high- 
est and holiest is the final cause of crea- 
tion. The arguments upon which this 
conclusion rests, as they are set forth in 
the " Destiny of Man " and epitomized in 
the concluding section of the present es- 
say, may all be found in " Cosmic Philoso- 
phy ; " but I failed to sum them up there 
and indicate the conclusion, almost within 
reach, which I had not quite clearly seized. 
When, after long hovering in the back- 
ground of consciousness, it suddenly flashed 
upon me two years ago, it came with such 
vividness as to seem like a revelation. 

This conclusion as to the implications 
of the doctrine of evolution concerning 



xxii Preface. 

Man's place in Nature supplies the ele- 
ment wanting in the theistic theory set 
forth in " Cosmic Philosophy," — the tele- 
ological element. It is profoundly true 
that a theory of things may seem theistic 
or atheistic in virtue of what it says of 
Man, no less than in virtue of what it says 
of God. The craving for a final cause is 
so deeply rooted in human nature that no 
doctrine of theism which fails to satisfy it 
can seem other than lame and ineffective. 
In writing "Cosmic Philosophy" I fully 
realized this when, in the midst of the 
argument against Paley's form of theism, 
I said that "the process of evolution is 
itself the working out of a mighty Tele- 
ology of which our finite understandings 
can fathom but the scantiest rudiments." 
Nevertheless, while the whole momentum 
of my thought carried me to the conviction 
that it must be so, I was not yet able to 
indicate how it is so, and I accordingly left 
the subject with this brief and inadequate 
hint. Could the point have been worked 



Preface. xxiii 

out then and there, I think it would have 
left no doubt in the minds of " Physicus" 
and Mr. Pollock as to the true character 
of Cosmic Theism. 

But hold, cries the scientific inquirer, 
what in the world are you doing? Are 
we again to resuscitate the phantom Te- 
leology, which we had supposed at last 
safely buried between cross-roads and 
pinned down with a stake ? Was not Ba- 
con right in characterizing "final causes " 
as vestal virgins, so barren has their study 
proved ? And has not Huxley, with yet 
keener sarcasm, designated them the he- 
tairce of philosophy, so often have they 
led men astray ? Very true. I do not 
wish to take back a single word of all that 
I have said in my chapter on "Anthro- 
pomorphic Theism " in condemnation of 
the teleological method and the peculiar 
theistic doctrines upon which it rests. As 
a means of investigation it is absolutely 
worthless. Nay, it is worse than worth- 
less ; it is treacherous, it is debauching to 



xxiv Preface. 

the intellect. But that is no reason why, 
when a distinct dramatic tendency in the 
events of the universe appears as the 
result of purely scientific investigation, 
we should refuse to recognize it. It is the 
object of the "Destiny of Man " to prove 
that there is such a dramatic tendency ; 
and while such a tendency cannot be re- 
garded as indicative of purpose in the 
limited anthropomorphic sense, it is still, 
as I said before, the objective aspect of 
that which, when regarded on its subjec- 
tive side, we call Purpose. There is a 
reasonableness in the universe such as to 
indicate that the Infinite Power of which 
it is the multiform manifestation is psy- 
chical, though it is impossible to ascribe 
to Him any of the limited psychical at- 
tributes which we know, or to argue from 
the ways of Man to the ways of God. 
For, as St. Paul reminds us, "who hath 
known the mind of the Lord, or who hath 
been his counsellor ? " 

It is in this sense that I accept Mr. 



Preface. xxv 

Spencer's doctrine of the Unknowable. 
How far my interpretation agrees with his 
own I do not undertake to say. On such 
an abstruse matter it is best that one 
should simply speak for one's self. But in 
his recent essay on " Retrogressive Re- 
ligion " he uses expressions which imply 
a doctrine of theism essentially similar to 
that here maintained. The " infinite and 
eternal Energy from which all things pro- 
ceed/' and which is the same power that 
" in ourselves wells up under the form of 
consciousness," is certainly the power 
which is here recognized as God. The 
term " Unknowable " I have carefully re- 
frained from using; it does not occur in 
the text of this essay. It describes only 
one aspect of Deity, but it has been seized 
upon by shallow writers of every school, 
treated as if fully synonymous with Deity, 
and made the theme of the most dismal 
twaddle that the world has been deluged 
with since the days of mediaeval scholasti- 
cism. The latest instance is the wretched 



xxvi Preface. 

positivist rubbish which Mr. Frederic Har- 
rison has mistaken for criticism, and to 
which it is almost a pity that Mr. Spencer 
should have felt called upon to waste his 
valuable time in replying. That which 
Mr. Spencer throughout all his works re- 
gards as the All-Being, the Power of which 
" our lives, alike physical and mental, in 
common with all the activities, organic 
and inorganic, amid which we live, are but 
the workings," — this omnipresent Power 
it pleases Mr. Harrison to call the "All- 
Nothingness," to describe it as "a logical 
formula begotten in controversy, dwelling 
apart from man and the world " (whatever 
all that may mean), and to imagine its wor- 
shippers as thus addressing it in prayer, 
" O % n , love us, help us, make us one with 
thee ! " If Mr. Harrison's aim were to 
understand, rather than to misrepresent, 
the religious attitude which goes with such 
a conception of Deity as Mr. Spencer's, 
he could nowhere find it more happily ex- 
pressed than in these wonderful lines of 
Goethe : — 



Preface. xxvii 

" Weltseele, komm, uns zu durchdringen ! 
Dann mit dem Weltgeist selbst zu ringen 

Wird unsrer Krafte Hochberuf. 
Theilnehmend fiihren gute Geister, 
Gelinde leitend, hochste Meister, 

Zu dem der alles schafft und schuf." 

Mr. Harrison is enabled to perform his 
antics simply because he happens to have 
such a word as " Unknowable' ' to play 
with. Yet the word which has been put 
to such unseemly uses is, when properly 
understood, of the highest value in theis- 
tic philosophy. That Deity per se is not 
only unknown but unknowable is a truth 
which Mr. Spencer has illustrated with all 
the resources of that psychologic analysis 
of which he is incomparably the greatest 
master the world has ever seen ; but it 
is not a truth which originated with him, 
or the demonstration of which is tanta- 
mount, as Mr. Harrison would have us 
believe, to the destruction of all religion. 
Among all the Christian theologians that 
have lived, there are few higher names 
than Athanasius, who also regarded Deity 



xxviii Preface. 

per se as unknowable, being revealed to 
mankind only through incarnation in 
Christ. It is not as failing to recognize 
its value that I have refrained in this essay 
from using the term " Unknowable ; " it is 
because so many false and stupid infer- 
ences have been drawn from Mr. Spencer's 
use of the word that it seemed worth while 
to show how a doctrine essentially similar 
to his might be expounded without intro- 
ducing it. For further elucidation I will- 
simply repeat in this connection what I 
wrote long ago : " It is enough to re- 
mind the reader that Deity is unknowable 
just in so far as it is not manifested to 
consciousness through the phenomenal 
world, — knowable just in so far as it is 
thus manifested : unknowable in so far as 
infinite and absolute, — knowable in the 
order of its phenomenal manifestations; 
knowable, in a symbolic way, as the Power 
which is disclosed in every throb of the 
mighty rhythmic life of the universe; 
knowable as the eternal Source of a Moral 



Preface. xxix 

Law which is implicated with each action 
of our lives, and in obedience to which lies 
our only guaranty of the happiness which 
is incorruptible, and which neither inevi- 
table misfortune nor unmerited obloquy 
can take away. Thus, though we may not 
by searching find out God, though we may 
not compass infinitude or attain to abso- 
lute knowledge, we may at least know all 
that it concerns us to know, as intelligent 
and responsible beings. They who seek 
to know more than this, to transcend the 
conditions under which alone is knowl- 
edge possible, are, in Goethe's profound 
language, as wise as little children who, 
when they have looked into a mirror, turn 
it around to see what is behind it. (" Cos- 
mic Philosophy/' vol. ii. p. 470.) 

The present essay must be regarded as 
a sequel to the " Destiny of Man," — so 
much so that the force of the argument 
in the concluding section can hardly be 
appreciated without reference to the other 



xxx Preface. 

book. The two books, taken together, 
contain the bare outlines of a theory of 
religion which I earnestly hope at some 
future time to state elaborately in a work 
on the true nature of Christianity, Some 
such scheme had begun vaguely to dawn 
upon my mind when I was fourteen years 
old, and thought in the language of the 
rigid Calvinistic orthodoxy then prevalent 
in New England. After many and exten- 
sive changes of opinion, the idea assumed 
definite shape in the autumn of 1869, when 
I conceived the plan of a book to be entitled 
" Jesus of Nazareth and the Founding of 
Christianity," — a work intended to deal 
on the one hand with the natural genesis 
of the complex aggregate of beliefs and as- 
pirations known as Christianity, and on the 
other hand with the metamorphoses which 
are being wrought in this aggregate by 
modern knowledge and modern theories 
of the universe. Such a book, involv- 
ing a treatment both historical and phil- 
osophical, requires long and varied prep- 



Preface. xxxi 

aration ; and I have always regarded my 
other books, published from time to time, 
as simply wayside studies preliminary to 
the undertaking of this complicated and 
difficult task. While thus habitually shap- 
ing my work with reference to this cher- 
ished idea, I have written some things 
which are in a special sense related to it 
The rude outlines of a very small portion 
of the historical treatment are contained 
in the essays on "The Jesus of History," 
and "The Christ of Dogma," published in 
the volume entitled " The Unseen World, 
and Other Essays." The outlines of the 
philosophical treatment are partially set 
forth in the " Destiny of Man " and in the 
present work. 

It amused me to see that almost every re- 
view of the " Destiny of Man " took pains 
to state that it was my Concord address 
"rewritten and expanded." Such trifles 
help one to understand the helter-skelter 
way in which more important things get 
said and believed. The " Destiny of 



xxxii Preface. 

Man " was printed exactly as it was de- 
livered at Concord, without the addition, 
or subtraction, or alteration of a single 
word. The case is the same with the 
present work. 

Petersham, September 6, 1885, 




CONTENTS. 

/. Difficulty of expressing the Idea of God so 

that it can he readily understood . . . 35 

II. The T{apid Growth of Modern Knowledge . 46 

III. Sources of the Theistic Idea 62 

IV. Development of Monotheism 72 

V. The Idea of God as immanent in the World . 81 

VI. The Idea of God as remote from the World. 8y 
VII. Conflict between the Two Ideas, commonly 
misunderstood as a Conflict between Re- 
ligion and Science . py 

VIII. Anthropomorphic Conceptions of God . ,111 

IX. The Argument from Design 118 

X. Simile of the Watch replaced by Simile of 

the Flower 128 

XI. The Craving for a Final Cause . . . . 134 
XII. Symbolic Conceptions 140 

XIII. The Eternal Source of Phenomena . . . 144 

XIV. The Power that makes for Righteousness • 158 




THE IDEA OF GOD. 




^Difficulty of expressing the Idea of God so 
that it can be readily understood. 
j|N Goethe's great poem, while Faust 
is walking with Margaret at even- 
tide in the garden, she asks him 
questions about his religion. It is long 
since he has been shriven or attended 
mass; does he, then, believe in God? — a 
question easy to answer with a simple yes, 
were it not for the form in which it is put. 
The great scholar and subtle thinker, who 
has delved in the deepest mines of philoso- 
phy and come forth weary and heavy-laden 
with their boasted treasures, has framed 
a very different conception of God from 
that entertained by the priest at the con- 



36 The Idea of God. 

fessional or the altar, and how is he to 
make this intelligible to the simple-minded 
girl that walks by his side? Who will 
make bold to declare that he can grasp an 
idea of such overwhelming vastness as the 
idea of God, yet who that hath the feel- 
ings of a man can bring himself to cast 
away a belief that is indispensable to the 
rational and healthful workings of the 
mind ? So long as the tranquil dome of 
heaven is raised above our heads and the 
firm-set earth is spread forth beneath our 
feet, while the everlasting stars course in 
their mighty orbits and the lover gazes 
with ineffable tenderness into the eyes of 
her that loves him, so long, says Faust, 
must our hearts go out toward Him that 
upholds and comprises all. Name or de- 
scribe as we may the Sustainer of the 
world, the eternal fact remains there, far 
above our comprehension, yet clearest and 
most real of all facts. To name and de- 
scribe it, to bring it within the formulas 
of theory or creed, is but to veil its glory 



The Idea of God. 37 

as when the brightness of heaven is en- 
shrouded in mist and smoke. This has 
a pleasant sound to Margaret's ears. It 
reminds her of what the parson some- 
times says, though couched in very differ- 
ent phrases; and yet she remains uneasy 
and unsatisfied. Her mind is benumbed 
by the presence of an idea confessedly too 
great to be grasped. She feels the need 
of some concrete symbol that can be read- 
ily apprehended ; and she hopes that her 
lover has not been learning bad lessons 
from Mephistopheles. 

The difficulty which here besets Marga- 
ret must doubtless have been felt by every 
one when confronted with the thoughts by 
which the highest human minds have en- 
deavoured to disclose the hidden life of 
the universe and interpret its meaning. It 
is a difficulty which baffles many, and they 
who surmount it are few indeed. Most 
people content themselves through life 
with a set of concrete formulas concerning 
Deity, and vituperate as atheistic all con- 



38 The Idea of God. 

ceptions which refuse to be compressed 
within the narrow limits of their creed. 
For the great mass of men the idea of 
God is quite overlaid and obscured by in- 
numerable symbolic rites and doctrines 
that have grown up in the course of the 
long historic development of religion. All 
such rites and doctrines had a meaning 
once, beautiful and inspiring or terrible 
and forbidding, and many of them still 
retain it. But whether meaningless or 
fraught with significance, men have wildly 
clung to them as shipwrecked mariners 
cling to the drifting spars that alone give 
promise of rescue from threatening death. 
Such concrete symbols have in all ages 
been argued and fought for until they have 
come to seem the essentials of religion; 
and new moons and sabbaths, decrees of 
councils and articles of faith, have usurped 
the place of the living God. In every age 
the theory or discovery — however pro- 
foundly theistic in its real import — which 
has thrown discredit upon such symbols 



The Idea of God. 39 

has been stigmatized as subversive of re- 
ligion, and its adherents have been reviled 
and persecuted. It is, of course, inevita- 
ble that this should be so. To the half- 
educated mind a theory of divine action 
couched in the form of a legend, in which 
God is depicted as entertaining human 
purposes and swayed by human passions, 
is not only intelligible, but impressive. It 
awakens emotion, it speaks to the heart, 
it threatens the sinner with wrath to come 
or heals the wounded spirit with sweet 
whispers of consolation. However myth- 
ical the form in which it is presented, 
however literally false the statements of 
which it is composed, it seems profoundly 
real and substantial. Just in so far as it 
is crudely concrete, just in so far as its 
terms can be vividly realized by the ordi- 
nary mind, does such a theological theory 
seem weighty and true. On the other 
hand, a theory of divine action which, dis- 
carding as far as possible the aid of con- 
crete symbols, attempts to include within 



40 The Idea of God. 

its range the endlessly complex operations 
that are forever going on throughout the 
length and breadth of the knowable uni- 
verse, — such a theory is to the ordinary 
mind unintelligible. It awakens no emo- 
tion because it is not understood. Though 
it may be the nearest approximation to 
the truth of which the human intellect is 
at the present moment capable, though 
the statements of which it is composed 
may be firmly based upon demonstrated 
facts in nature, it will nevertheless seem 
eminently unreal and uninteresting. The 
dullest peasant can understand you when 
you tell him that honey is sweet, while a 
statement that the ratio of the circumfer- 
ence of a circle to its diameter may be 
expressed by the formula tt = 3. 141 59 
will sound as gibberish in his ears ; yet 
the truth embodied in the latter statement 
is far more closely implicated with every 
act of the peasant's life, if he only knew 
it, than the truth expressed in the former. 
So the merest child may know enough to 



The Idea of God. 41 

marvel at the Hebrew legend of the burn- 
ing bush, but only the ripest scholar can 
begin to understand the character of the 
mighty problems with which Spinoza was 
grappling when he had so much to say 
about natura naturans and natura natu- 
rata. 

For these reasons all attempts to study 
God as revealed in the workings of the 
visible universe, and to characterize the 
divine activity in terms derived from such 
study, have met with discouragement, if 
not with obloquy. As substituting a less 
easily comprehensible formula for one that 
is more easily comprehensible, they seem 
to be frittering away the idea of God, 
and reducing it to an empty abstraction. 
There is a further reason for the dread 
with which such studies are commonly re- 
garded. The theories of divine action ac- 
cepted as orthodox by the men of any age 
have been bequeathed to them by their 
forefathers of an earlier age. They were 
originally framed with reference to as- 



42 The Idea of God. 

sumed facts of nature which advancing 
knowledge is continually discrediting and 
throwing aside. Each forward step in 
physical science obliges us to contemplate 
the universe from a somewhat altered point 
of view, so that the mutual relations of its 
parts keep changing as in an ever-shifting 
landscape. The notions of the world and 
its Maker with which we started by and 
by prove meagre and unsatisfying ; they 
no longer fit in with the general scheme 
of our knowledge. Hence the men who 
are wedded to the old notions are quick to 
sound the alarm. They would fain deter 
us from taking the forward step which 
carries us to a new standpoint. Beware 
of science, they cry, lest with its dazzling 
discoveries and adventurous speculations 
it rob us of our soul's comfort and leave 
us in a godless world. Such in every age 
has been the cry of the more timid and 
halting spirits ; and their fears have found 
apparent confirmation in the behaviour of 
a very different class of thinkers. As there 



The Idea of God. 4) 

are those who live in perpetual dread of 
the time when science shall banish God 
from the world, so, on the other hand, 
there are those who look forward with 
longing to such a time, and in their impa- 
tience are continually starting up and pro- 
claiming that at last it has come. There 
are those who have indeed learned a les- 
son from Mephistopheles, the "spirit that 
forever denies." These are they that say 
in their hearts, "There is no God," and 
"congratulate themselves that they are 
going to die like the beasts." Rushing 
into the holiest arcana of philosophy, even 
where angels fear to tread, they lay hold 
of each new discovery in science that mod- 
ifies our view of the universe, and herald 
it as a crowning victory for the material- 
ists, — a victory which is ushering in the 
happy day when atheism is to be the creed 
of all men. It is in view of such philoso- 
phizers that the astronomer, the chemist, 
or the anatomist, whose aim is the dispas- 
sionate examination of evidence and the 



44 The Idea of God. 

unbiassed study of phenomena, may fitly 
utter the prayer, " Lord, save me from my 
friends ! " 

Thus through age after age has it fared 
with men's discoveries in science, and with 
their thoughts about God and the soul. 
It was so in the days of Galileo and New- 
ton, and we have found it to be so in the 
days of Darwin and Spencer. The the- 
ologian exclaims, If planets are held in 
place by gravitation and tangential mo- 
mentum, and if the highest forms of life 
have been developed by natural selection 
and direct adaptation, then the universe 
is swayed by blind forces, and nothing is 
left for God to do : how impious and ter- 
rible the thought ! Even so, echoes the fa- 
vourite atheist, the Lamettrie or Buchner 
of the day; the universe, it seems, has 
always got on without a God, and accord- 
ingly there is none : how noble and cheer- 
ing the thought ! And as thus age after 
age they wrangle, with their eyes turned 
away from the light, the world goes on to 



The Idea of God. 45 

larger and larger knowledge in spite of 
them, and does not lose its faith, for all 
these darkeners of counsel may say. As 
in the roaring loom of Time the endless 
web of events is woven, each strand shall 
make more and more clearly visible the 
living garment of God. 




II. 




The Rapid Growth of [Modern Knowledge. 

i)T no time since men have dwelt 
upon the earth have their notions 
about the universe undergone so 
great a change as in the century of which 
we are now approaching the end. Never 
before has knowledge increased so rapidly ; 
never before has philosophical speculation 
been so actively conducted, or its results 
so widely diffused. It is a characteristic 
of organic evolution that numerous pro- 
gressive tendencies, for a long time incon- 
spicuous, now and then unite to bring about 
a striking and apparently sudden change ; 
or a set of forces, quietly accumulating in 
one direction, at length unlock some new 
reservoir of force and abruptly inaugurate 
a new series of phenomena, as when water 
rises in a tank until its overflow sets whirl- 



The Idea of God. 47 

ing a system of toothed wheels. It may- 
be that Nature makes no leaps, but in this 
way she now and then makes very long 
strides. It is in this way that the course 
of organic development is marked here and 
there by memorable epochs, which seem to 
open new chapters in the history of the 
universe. There was such an epoch when 
the common ancestor of ascidian and am- 
phioxus first showed rudimentary traces of 
a vertebral column. There was such an 
epoch when the air-bladder of early am- 
phibians began to do duty as a lung. 
Greatest of all, since the epoch, still hidden 
from our ken, when organic life began upon 
the surface of the globe, was the birth of 
that new era when, through a wondrous 
change in the direction of the working of 
natural selection, Humanity appeared upon 
the scene. In the career of the human 
race we can likewise point to periods in 
which it has become apparent that an im- 
mense stride was taken. Such a period 
marks the dawning of human history, when 



48 The Idea of God. 

after countless ages of desultory tribal war- 
fare men succeeded in uniting into com- 
paratively stable political societies, and 
through the medium of written language 
began handing down to posterity the record 
of their thoughts and deeds. Since that 
morning twilight of history there has been 
no era so strongly marked, no change so 
swift or so far-reaching in the conditions of 
human life, as that which began with the 
great maritime discoveries of the fifteenth 
century and is approaching its culmination 
to-day. In its earlier stages this modern 
era was signalized by sporadic achievements 
of the human intellect, great in themselves 
and leading to such stupendous results as 
the boldest dared not dream of. Such 
achievements were the invention of print- 
ing* the telescope and microscope, the 
geometry of Descartes, the astronomy of 
Newton, the physics of Huyghens, the 
physiology of Harvey. Man's senses were 
thus indefinitely enlarged as his means of 
registration were perfected ; he became 



The Idea of God. 4g 

capable of extending physical inferences 
from the earth to the heavens ; and he made 
his first acquaintance with that luminif erous 
ether which was by and by to reveal the 
intimate structure of matter in regions far 
beyond the power of the microscope to 
penetrate. 

It is only within the present century that 
the vastness of the changes thus beginning 
to be wrought has become apparent. The 
scientific achievements of the human intel- 
lect no longer occur sporadically : they fol- 
low one upon another, like the organized 
and systematic conquests of a resistless 
army. Each new discovery becomes at 
once a powerful implement in the hands 
of innumerable workers, and each year 
wins over fresh regions of the universe 
from the unknown to the known. Our own 
generation has become so wonted to this 
unresting march of discovery that we al- 
ready take it as quite a matter of course. 
Our minds become easily deadened to its 
real import, and the examples we cite in 

4 



$o The Idea of God. 

illustration of it have an air of triteness. 
We scarcely need to be reminded that all 
the advances made in locomotion, from the 
days of Nebuchadnezzar to those of Andrew 
Jackson, were as nothing compared to the 
change that has been wrought within a few 
years by the introduction of railroads. In 
these times, when Puck has fulfilled his 
boast and put a girdle about the earth in 
forty minutes, we are not yet perhaps in 
danger of forgetting that a century has not 
elapsed since he who caught the lightning 
upon his kite was laid in the grave. Yet 
the lesson of these facts, as well as of the 
grandmother's spinning-wheel that stands 
by the parlour fireside, is well to bear 
in mind. The change therein exemplified 
since Penelope plied her distaff is far less 
than that which has occurred within the 
memory of living men. The developments 
of machinery, which have worked such 
wonders, have greatly altered the political 
conditions of human society, so that a huge 
republic like the United States is now as 



The Idea of God. 5/ 

snug and compact and easily manageable 
as the tiny republic of Switzerland in the 
eighteenth century. The number of men 
that can live upon a given area of the 
earth's surface has been multiplied mani- 
fold, and while the mass of human life has 
thus increased its value has been at the 
same time enhanced. 

In these various applications of physical 
theory to the industrial arts, countless 
minds, of a class that formerly were not 
reached by scientific reasoning at all, are 
now brought into daily contact with com- 
plex and subtle operations of matter, and 
their habits of thought are thus notably 
modified. Meanwhile, in the higher regions 
of chemistry and molecular physics the 
progress has been such that no description 
can do it justice. When we reflect that a 
fourth generation has barely had time to 
appear on the scene since Priestley discov- 
ered that there was such a thing as oxygen, 
we stand awestruck before the stupendous 
pile of chemical science which has been 



$2 The Idea of God. 

reared in this brief interval. Our knowl- 
edge thus gained of the molecular and 
atomic structure of matter has been alone 
sufficient to remodel our conceptions of 
the universe from beginning to end. The 
case of molecular physics is equally strik- 
ing. The theory of the conservation of 
energy, and the discovery that light, heat, 
electricity, and magnetism are differently 
conditioned modes of undulatory motion 
transformable each into the other, are not 
yet fifty years old. In physical astronomy 
we remained until 1839 confined within 
the limits of the solar system, and even 
here the Newtonian theory had not yet won 
its crowning triumph in the discovery of 
the planet Neptune. To-day we not only 
measure the distances and movements of 
many stars, but by means of spectrum 
analysis are able to tell what they are made 
of. It is more than a century since the 
nebular hypothesis, by which we explain 
the development of stellar systems, was 
first propounded by Immanuel Kant, but 



The Idea of God. 53 

it is only within thirty years that it has 
been generally adopted by astronomers ; 
and among the outward illustrations of its 
essential soundness none is more remarka- 
ble than its surviving such an enlargement 
of our knowledge. Coming to the geologic 
study of the changes that have taken place 
on the earth's surface, it was in 1830 that 
Sir Charles Lyell published the book which 
first placed this study upon a scientific 
basis. Cuvier's classification of past and 
present forms of animal life, which laid 
the foundations alike of comparative anat- 
omy and of palaeontology, came but little 
earlier. The cell-doctrine of Schleiden and 
Schwann, prior to which modern biology 
can hardly be said to have existed, dates 
from 1839; and it was only ten years be- 
fore that the scientific treatment of embry- 
ology began with Von Baer. At the pres- 
ent moment, twenty-six years have not 
elapsed since the epoch-making work of 
Darwin first announced to the world the 
discovery of natural selection. 



54 The Idea of God. 

In the cycle of studies which are imme- 
diately concerned with the career of man- 
kind, the rate of progress has been no less 
marvellous. The scientific study of human 
speech may be said to date from the flash 
of insight which led Friedrich Schlegel in 
1808 to detect the kinship between the 
Aryan languages. From this beginning 
to the researches of Fick and Ascoli in 
our own time, the quantity of achievement 
rivals anything the physical sciences can 
show. The study of comparative mythol- 
ogy, which has thrown such light upon 
the primitive thoughts of mankind, is still 
younger, — is still, indeed, in its infancy. 
The application of the comparative method 
to the investigation of laws and customs, 
of political and ecclesiastical and indus- 
trial systems, has been carried on scarcely 
thirty years ; yet the results already ob- 
tained are obliging us to rewrite the his- 
tory of mankind in all its stages. The 
great achievements of archaeologists — the 
decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and 



The Idea of God. 55 

of cuneiform inscriptions in Assyria and 
Persia, the unearthing of ancient cities, 
the discovery and classification of primeval 
implements and works of art in all quar- 
ters of the globe — belong almost entirely 
to the nineteenth century. These discov- 
eries, which have well-nigh doubled for us 
the length of the historic period, have 
united with the quite modern revelations 
of geology concerning the ancient glacia- 
tion of the temperate zones, to give us an 
approximate idea of the age of the human 
race * and the circumstances attending its 
diffusion over the earth. It has thus at 
length become possible to obtain some- 
thing like the outlines of a comprehensive 
view of the history of the creation, from 
the earliest stages of condensation of our 
solar nebula down to the very time in 
which we live, and to infer from the char- 
acteristics of this past evolution some of 
the most general tendencies of the future. 

All this accumulation of physical and 
historical knowledge has not failed to re- 



$6 The Idea of God. 

act upon our study of the human mind 
itself. In books of logic the score of cen- 
turies between Aristotle and Whately saw- 
less advance than the few years between 
Whately and Mill. In psychology the 
work of Fechner and Wundt and Spencer 
belongs to the age in which we are now 
living. When to all this variety of achieve- 
ment we add what has been done in the 
critical study of literature and art, of clas- 
sical and Biblical philology, and of met- 
aphysics and theology, illustrating from 
fresh points of view the history of the hu- 
man mind, the sum total becomes almost 
too vast to be comprehended. This cen- 
tury, which some have called an age of 
iron, has been also an age of ideas, an era 
of seeking and finding the like of which 
was never known before. It is an epoch 
the grandeur of which dwarfs all others 
that can be named since the beginning 
of the historic period, if not since Man 
first became distinctively human. In their 
mental habits, in their methods of inquiry, 



The Idea of God. $y 

and in the data at their command, " the 
men of the present day who have fully- 
kept pace with the scientific movement are 
separated from the men whose education 
ended in 1830 by an immeasurably wider 
gulf than has ever before divided one pro- 
gressive generation of men from their pre- 
decessors/' 2 The intellectual development 
of the human race has been suddenly, al- 
most abruptly, raised to a higher plane 
than that upon which it had proceeded 
from the days of the primitive troglodyte 
to the days of our great-grandfathers. It 
is characteristic of this higher plane of de- 
velopment that the progress which until 
lately was so slow must henceforth be 
rapid. Men's minds are becoming more 
flexible, the resistance to innovation is 
weakening, and our intellectual demands 
are multiplying while the means of satis- 
fying them are increasing. Vast as are 
the achievements we have just passed in 
review, the gaps in our knowledge are im- 
mense, and every problem that is solved 



5<S The Idea of God. 

but opens a dozen new problems that await 
solution. Under such circumstances there 
is no likelihood that the last word will soon 
be said on any subject. In the eyes of 
the twenty-first century the science of the 
nineteenth will doubtless seem very frag- 
mentary and crude. But the men of that 
day, and of all future time, will no doubt 
point back to the age just passing away 
as the opening of a new dispensation, the 
dawning of an era in which the intellect- 
ual development of mankind was raised to 
a higher plane than that upon which it had 
hitherto proceeded. 

As the inevitable result of the thronging 
discoveries just enumerated, we find our- 
selves in the midst of a mighty revolution 
in human thought. Time-honoured creeds 
are losing their hold upon men; ancient 
symbols are shorn of their value ; every- 
thing is called in question. The contro- 
versies of the day are not like those of 
former times. It is no longer a question 
of hermeneutics, no longer a struggle be- 



The Idea of God. 59 

tween abstruse dogmas of rival churches. 
Religion itself is called upon to show why 
it should any longer claim our allegiance. 
There are those who deny the existence 
of God. There are those who would ex- 
plain away the human soul as a mere 
group of fleeting phenomena attendant 
upon the collocation of sundry particles of 
matter. And there are many others who, 
without committing themselves to these 
positions of the atheist and the material- 
ist, have nevertheless come to regard re- 
ligion as practically ruled out from human 
affairs. No religious creed that man has 
ever devised can be made to harmonize in 
all its features with modern knowledge. 
All such creeds were constructed with ref- 
erence to theories of the universe which 
are now utterly and hopelessly discredited. 
How, then, it is asked, amid the general 
wreck of old beliefs, can we hope that the 
religious attitude in which from time im- 
memorial we have been wont to contem- 
plate the universe can any longer be main- 



60 The Idea of God. 

tained ? Is not the belief in God perhaps 
a dream of the childhood of our race, like 
the belief in elves and bogarts which once 
was no less universal ? and is not modern 
science fast destroying the one as it has 
already destroyed the other ? 

Such are the questions which we daily 
hear asked, sometimes with flippant eager- 
ness, but oftener with anxious dread. In 
view of them it is well worth while to 
examine the idea of God, as it has been 
entertained by mankind from the earliest 
ages, and as it is affected by the knowl- 
edge of the universe which we have ac- 
quired in recent times. If we find in that 
idea, as conceived by untaught thinkers in 
the twilight of antiquity, an element that 
still survives the widest and deepest gen- 
eralizations of modern times, we have the 
strongest possible reason for believing that 
the idea is permanent and answers to an 
Eternal Reality. It was to be expected 
that conceptions of Deity handed down 
from primitive men should undergo seri- 



The Idea of God. 61 

ous modification. If it can be shown that 
the essential element in these conceptions 
must survive the enormous additions to 
our knowledge which have distinguished 
the present age above all others since man 
became man, then we may believe that it 
will endure so long as man endures ; for it 
is not likely that it can ever be called upon 
to pass a severer ordeal. 

All this will presently appear in a still 
stronger light, when we have set forth the 
common characteristic of the modifications 
which the idea of God has already under- 
gone, and the nature of the opposition be- 
tween the old and the new knowledge with 
which we are now confronted. Upon this 
discussion we have now to enter, and we 
shall find it leading us to the conclusion 
that throughout all possible advances in 
human knowledge, so far as we can see, 
the essential position of theism must re- 
main unshaken. 



III. 




Sources of the Theistic Idea. 

f|UR argument may fitly begin with 
an inquiry into the sources of the 
theistic idea and the shape which 
it has universally assumed among untu- 
tored men. The most primitive element 
which it contains is doubtless the notion 
of dependence upon something outside of 
ourselves. We are born into a world con- 
sisting of forces which sway our lives and 
over which we can exercise no control. 
The individual man can indeed make his 
volition count for a very little in modify- 
ing the course of events, but this end 
necessitates strict and unceasing obedi- 
ence to powers that cannot be tampered 
with. To the behaviour of these external 
powers our actions must be adapted under 
penalty of death. And upon grounds no 



The Idea of God. 63 

less firm than those on which we believe 
in any externality whatever, we recognize 
that these forces antedated our birth and 
will endure after we have disappeared 
from the scene. No one supposes that he 
makes the world for himself, so that it is 
born and dies with him. Every one per- 
force contemplates the world as something 
existing independently of himself, as some- 
thing into which he has come, and from 
which he is to go ; and for his coming 
and his going, as well as for what he does 
while part of the world, he is dependent 
upon something that is not himself. 

Between ancient and modern man, as 
between the child and the adult, there can 
be no essential difference in the recogni- 
tion of this fundamental fact of life. The 
primitive man could not, indeed, state the 
case in this generalized form, any more 
than a young child could state it, but the 
facts which the statement covers were as 
real to him as they are to us.* The prim- 

* See note A at the end of the volume. 



64 The Idea of God, 

itive man knew nothing of a world, in the 
modern sense of the word. The concep- 
tion of that vast consensus of forces which 
we call the world or universe is a some- 
what late result of culture ; it was reached 
only through ages of experience and re- 
flection. Such an idea lay beyond the 
horizon of the primitive man. But while 
he knew not the world, he knew bits and 
pieces of it ; or, to vary the expression, he 
had his little world, chaotic and fragmen- 
tary enough, but full of dread reality for 
him. He knew what it was to deal from 
birth until death with powers far mightier 
than himself. To explain these powers, to 
make their actions in any wise intelligible, 
he had but one available resource ; and 
this was so obvious that he could not fail 
to employ it. The only source of action 
of which he knew anything, since it was 
the only source which lay within himself, 
was the human will ; 3 and in this respect, 
after all, the philosophy of the primeval 
savage was not so very far removed from 



The Idea of God. 65 

that of the modern scientific thinker. The 
primitive man could see that his own ac- 
tions were prompted by desire and guided 
by intelligence, and he supposed the same 
to be the case with the sun and the wind, 
the frost and the lightning. All the forces 
of outward nature, so far as they came 
into visible contact with his life, he per- 
sonified as great beings which were to be 
contended with or placated. This prime- 
val philosophy, once universal among men, 
has lasted far into the historic period, and 
it is only slowly and bit by bit that it has 
been outgrown by the most highly civil- 
ized races. Indeed the half-civilized ma- 
jority of mankind have by no means as 
yet cast it aside, and among savage tribes 
we may still see it persisting in all its 
original crudity. In the mythologies of 
all peoples, of the Greeks and Hindus and 
Norsemen, as well as of the North Ameri- 
can Indians and the dwellers in the South 
Sea islands, we find the sun personified 
as an archer or wanderer, the clouds as 
5 



66 The Idea of God. 

gigantic birds, the tempest as a devouring 
dragon ; and the tales of gods and heroes, 
as well as of trolls and fairies, are made 
up of scattered and distorted fragments 
of nature-myths, of which the primitive 
meaning had long been forgotten when 
the ingenuity of modern scholarship laid 
it bare. 4 

In all this personification of physical 
phenomena our prehistoric ancestors were 
greatly assisted by that theory of ghosts 
which was perhaps the earliest speculative 
effort of the human mind. Travellers 
have now and then reported the existence 
of races of men quite destitute of religion, 
or of what the observer has learned to 
recognize as religion ; but no one has ever 
discovered a race of men devoid of a belief 
in ghosts. The mass of crude inference 
which makes up the savage's philosophy 
of nature is largely based upon the hypoth- 
esis that every man has another self, a 
double, or wraith, or ghost. This " hypoth- 
esis of the other self, which serves to ac- 



The Idea of God. 67 

count for the savage's wanderings during 
sleep in strange lands and among strange 
people, serves also to account for the pres- 
ence in his dreams of parents, comrades, 
or enemies, known to be dead and buried. 
The other self of the dreamer meets and 
converses with the other selves of his dead 
brethren, joins with them in the hunt, or 
sits down with them to the wild cannibal 
banquet. Thus arises the belief in an 
ever-present world of ghosts, a belief which 
the entire experience of uncivilized man 
goes to strengthen and expand." 5 Count- 
less tales and superstitions of savage races 
show that the hypothesis of the other self 
is used to explain the phenomena of hys- 
teria and epilepsy, of shadows, of echoes, 
and even of the reflection of face and ges- 
tures in still water. It is not only men, 
moreover, who are provided with other 
selves. Dumb beasts and plants, stone 
hatchets and arrows, articles of clothing 
and food, all have their ghosts ; 6 and when 
the dead chief is buried, his wives and 



68 The Idea of God. 

servants, his dogs and horses, are slain 
to keep him company, and weapons and 
trinkets are placed in his tomb to be used 
in the spirit-land. Burial-places of primi- 
tive men, ages before the dawn of history, 
bear testimony to the immense antiquity 
of this savage philosophy. From this 
wholesale belief in ghosts to the interpre- 
tation of the wind or the lightning as a 
person animated by an indwelling soul and 
endowed with quasi-human passions and 
purposes, the step is not a long one. The 
latter notion grows almost inevitably out 
of the former, so that all races of men 
without exception have entertained it. 
That the mighty power which uproots 
trees and drives the storm-clouds across 
the sky should resemble a human soul is 
to the savage an unavoidable inference. 
" If the fire burns down his hut, it is be- 
cause the fire is a person with a soul, and 
is angry with him, and needs to be coaxed 
into a kindlier mood by means of prayer 
or sacrifice. ,, He has no alternative but 



The Idea of God. 69 

to regard fire-soul as something akin to 
human-soul ; his philosophy makes no dis- 
tinction between the human ghost and the 
elemental demon or deity. 

It was in accordance with this primitive 
theory of things that the earliest form of 
religious worship was developed. In all 
races of men, so far as can be determined, 
this was the worship of ancestors. 7 The 
other self of the dead chieftain continued 
after death to watch over the interests of 
the tribe, to defend it against the attacks 
of enemies, to reward brave warriors, and 
to punish traitors and cowards. His fa- 
vour must be propitiated with ceremonies 
like those in which a subject does homage 
to a living ruler. If offended by neglect 
or irreverent treatment, defeat in battle, 
damage by flood or fire, visitations of fam- 
ine or pestilence, were interpreted as 
marks of his anger. Thus the spirits ani- 
mating the forces of nature were often 
identified with the ghosts of ancestors, and 
mythology is filled with traces of the con- 



jo The Idea of God. 

fusion. In the Vedic religion the pitris, 
or "fathers," live in the sky along with 
Yama, the original pitri of mankind : they 
are very busy with the weather ; they send 
down rain to refresh the thirsty earth, or 
anon parch the fields till the crops perish 
of drought ; and they rush along in the 
roaring tempest, like the weird host of the 
wild huntsman Wodan. To the ancient 
Greek the blue sky Uranos was the father 
of gods and men, and throughout antiq- 
uity this mingling of ancestor-worship with 
nature-worship was general. With the 
systematic development of ethnic relig- 
ions, in some instances ancestor-worship 
remained dominant, as with the Chinese, 
the Japanese, and the Romans ; in others, 
a polytheism based upon nature-worship 
acquired supremacy, as with the Hindus 
and Greeks, and our own Teutonic fore- 
fathers. The great divinities of the Hel- 
lenic pantheon are all personifications of 
physical phenomena. At a comparatively 
late date the Roman adopted these divin- 



The Idea of God. 7/ 

ities and paid to them a fashionable and 
literary homage, but his solemn and heart- 
felt rites were those with which he wor- 
shipped the lares and penates in the pri- 
vacy of his home. His hospitable treat- 
ment of the gods of a vanquished people 
was the symptom of a commingling of the 
various local religions of antiquity which 
insured their mutual destruction and pre- 
pared the way for their absorption into a 
far grander and truer system. 8 




IV. 




Development of Monotheism. 

UCH an allusion to the Romans, 
in an exposition like the present 
one, is not without its signifi- 
cance. It was partly through political cir- 
cumstances that a truly theistic idea was 
developed out of the chaotic and fragmen- 
tary ghost theories and nature-worship of 
the primeval world. To the framing of 
the vastest of all possible conceptions, the 
idea of God, man came but slowly. This 
nature-worship and ancestor-worship of 
earJy times was scarcely theism. In their 
recognition of man's utter dependence 
upon something outside of himself which 
yet was not wholly unlike himself, these 
primitive religions contained the essential 
germ out of which theism was to grow ; 
but it is a long way from the propitiation 



The Idea of God. 73 

of ghosts and the adoration of the rising 
sun to the worship of the infinite and 
eternal God, the maker of heaven and 
earth, in whom we live, and move, and 
have our being. Before men could arrive 
at such a conception, it was necessary for 
them to obtain some integral idea of the 
heaven and the earth ; it was necessary 
for them to frame, however inadequately, 
the conception of a physical universe. 
Such a conception had been reached by 
civilized peoples before the Christian era, 
and by the Greeks a remarkable begin- 
ning had been made in the generalization 
and interpretation of physical phenomena. 
The intellectual atmosphere of Alexan- 
dria, for two centuries before and three 
centuries after the time of Christ, was 
more modern than anything that followed 
down to the days of Bacon and Descartes ; 
and all the leaders of Greek thought since 
Anaxagoras had been virtually or avowed- 
ly monotheists. As the phenomena of na- 
ture were generalized, the deities or super- 



J4 The Idea of God. 

human beings regarded as their sources 
were likewise generalized, until the con- 
ception of nature as a whole gave rise to 
the conception of a single Deity as the 
author and ruler of nature ; and in accord- 
ance with the order of its genesis, this 
notion of Deity was still the notion of a 
Being possessed of psychical attributes, 
and in some way like unto Man. 

But there was another cause, besides 
scientific generalization, which led men's 
minds toward monotheism. The concep- 
tion of tutelar deities, which was the most 
prominent practical feature of ancestor- 
worship, was directly affected by the po- 
litical development of the peoples of an- 
tiquity. As tribes were consolidated into 
nations, the tutelar gods of the tribes be- 
came generalized, or the god of some lead- 
ing tribe came to supersede his fellows, 
until the result was a single national deity, 
at first regarded as the greatest among 
gods, afterwards as the only God., The 
most striking instance of this method of 



The Idea of God. 75 

development is afforded by the Hebrew 
conception of Jehovah. The most primi- 
tive form of Hebrew religion discernible 
in the Old Testament is a fetichism, or 
very crude polytheism, in which ancestor- 
worship becomes more prominent than 
nature-worship. At first the teraphim, or 
tutelar household deities, play an impor- 
tant part, but nature-gods, such as Baal, 
and Moloch, and Astarte, are extensively 
worshipped. It is the plural elohim who 
create the earth, and whose sons visit the 
daughters of antediluvian men. The tute- 
lar deity, Jehovah, is originally thought of 
as one of the elohim, then as chief among 
elohim, and Lord of the hosts of heaven. 
Through his favour his chosen prophet 
overcomes the prophets of Baal, he is 
greater than the deities of neighbouring 
peoples, he is the only true god, and thus 
finally he is thought of as the only God, 
and his name becomes the symbol of mon- 
otheism. The Jews have always been one 
of the most highly-gifted races in the 



j6 The Idea of God. 

world. In antiquity they developed an 
intense sentiment of nationality, and for 
earnestness and depth of ethical feeling 
they surpassed all other peoples. The 
conception of Jehovah set forth in the 
writings of the prophets was the loftiest 
conception of deity anywhere attained be- 
fore the time of Christ ; in ethical value 
it immeasurably surpassed anything to be 
found in the pantheon of the Greeks and 
Romans. It was natural that such a 
conception of deity should be adopted 
throughout the Roman world. At the be- 
ginning of the Christian era the classic 
polytheism had well-nigh lost its hold upon 
men's minds ; its value had become chiefly 
literary, as a mere collection of pretty sto- 
ries; it had begun its descent into the 
humble realm of folk-lore. For want of 
anything better people had recourse to 
elaborate Eastern ceremonials, or con- 
tented themselves with the time-honoured 
domestic worship of the lares an&penates, 
Yet their minds were ripe for some kind 



The Idea of God. yy 

of monotheism, and in order that the Jew- 
ish conception should come to be gen- 
erally adopted, it was only necessary that 
it should be freed from its limitations of 
nationality, and that Jehovah should be 
set forth as Sustainer of the universe and 
Father of all mankind. This was done by 
Jesus and Paul. The theory of divine ac- 
tion implied throughout the gospels and 
the epistles was the first complete mono- 
theism attained by mankind, or at least by 
that portion of it from which our modern 
civilization has descended. Here for the 
first time we have the idea of God disso- 
ciated from the limiting circumstances 
with which it had been entangled in all 
the ethnic religions of antiquity. Individ- 
ual thinkers here and there had already, 
doubtless, reached an equally true concep- 
tion, as was shown by Kleanthes in his 
sublime hymn to Zeus ; 9 but it was now 
for the first time set forth in such wise as 
to win assent from the common folk as 
well as the philosophers, and to make its 



j8 The Idea of God. 

way into the hearts of all men. Its ac- 
ceptance was hastened, and its hold upon 
mankind immeasurably strengthened, by 
the divinely beautiful ethical teaching in 
which Jesus couched it, — that teaching, 
so often misunderstood yet so profoundly 
true, which heralded the time when Man 
shall have thrown off the burden of his 
bestial inheritance and strife and sorrow 
shall cease from the earth. 10 

We shall presently see that in its funda- 
mental features the theism of Jesus and 
Paul was so true that it must endure as 
long as man endures. Changes of state- 
ment may alter the outward appearance of 
it, but the kernel of truth will remain the 
same forever. But the shifting body of re- 
ligious doctrine known as Christianity has 
at various times contained much that is 
unknown to this pure theism, and much 
that has shown itself to be ephemeral in its 
hold upon men. The change from poly- 
theism to monotheism could not be thor- 
oughly accomplished all at once. As 



The Idea of God. yg 

Christianity spread over the Roman world 
it became encrusted with pagan notions 
and observances, and a similar process 
went on during the conversion of the Teu- 
tonic barbarians. Yuletide and Easter and 
other church holidays were directly adopted 
from the old nature-worship ; the adoration 
of tutelar household deities survived in the 
homage paid to patron saints ; and the 
worship of the Berecynthian Mother was 
continued in that of the Virgin Mary. 11 
Even the name God, applied to the Deity 
throughout Teutonic Christendom, seems 
to be neither more nor less than Wodan, 
the personification of the storm-wind, the 
supreme divinity of our pagan forefathers.* 
That Christianity should thus have re- 
tained names and symbols and rites belong- 
ing to heathen antiquity was inevitable. 
The system of Christian theism was the 
work of some of the loftiest minds that have 
ever appeared upon the earth ; but it was 
adopted by millions of men and women, of 

* See note B. at the end of the volume. 



80 The Idea of God. 

all degrees of knowledge and ignorance, of 
keenness and dullness, of spirituality and 
grossness, and these brought to it their 
various inherited notions and habits of 
thought. In all its ages, therefore, Chris- 
tian theism has meant one thing to one 
person, and another thing to another. 
While the highest Christian minds have 
always been monotheistic, the multitude 
have outgrown polytheism but slowly ; 
and even the monotheism of the highest 
minds has been coloured by notions ulti- 
mately derived from the primeval ghost- 
world which have interfered with its pu- 
rity, and have seriously hampered men in 
their search after truth. 

In illustration of this point we have now 
to notice two strongly contrasted views of 
the divine nature which have been held 
by Christian theists, and to observe their 
bearings upon the scientific thought of 
modern times. 



V. 

The Idea of God as immanent in the World. 



h 




|E have seen that since the prim- 
itive savage philosophy did not 
distinguish between the human 
ghost and the elemental demon or deity, 
the religion of antiquity was an inextrica- 
ble tangle of ancestor-worship with nature- 
worship. Nevertheless, among some peo- 
ples the one, among others the other, 
became predominant. I think it can hardly 
be an accidental coincidence that nature- 
worship predominated with the Greeks and 
Hindus, the only peoples of antiquity who 
accomplished anything in the exact sci- 
ences, or in metaphysics. The capacity for 
abstract thinking which led the Hindu to 
originate algebra, and the Greek to orig- 
inate geometry, and both to attempt elabo- 
rate scientific theories of the universe, — ■ 



82 The Idea of God. 

this same capacity revealed itself in the 
manner in which they deified the powers 
of nature. They were able to imagine the 
indwelling spirit of the sun or the storm 
without help from the conception of an 
individual ghost. Such being the general 
capacity of the people, we can readily un- 
derstand how, when it came to monotheism, 
their most eminent thinkers should have 
been able to frame the conception of God 
acting in and through the powers of nature, 
without the aid of any grossly anthropomor- 
phic symbolism. In this connection it is 
interesting to observe the characteristics 
of the idea of God as conceived by the 
three greatest fathers of the Greek church, 
Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Atha- 
nasius. The philosophy of these profound 
and vigorous thinkers was in large meas- 
ure derived from the Stoics. They regarded 
Deity as immanent in the universe, and 
eternally operating through natural laws. 
In their view God is not a localizable per- 
sonality, remote from the world, and acting 



The Idea of God. 83 

upon it only by means of occasional portent 
and prodigy ; nor is the world a lifeless 
machine blindly working after some preor- 
dained method, and only feeling the pres- 
ence of God in so far as he now and then 
sees fit to interfere with its normal course 
of procedure. On the contrary, God is the 
ever-present life of the world ; it is through 
him that all things exist from moment to 
moment, and the natural sequence of events 
is a perpetual revelation of the divine wis- 
dom and goodness. In accordance with 
this fundamental view, Clement, for exam- 
ple, repudiated the Gnostic theory of the 
vileness of matter, condemned asceticism, 
and regarded the world as hallowed by the 
presence of indwelling Deity. Knowing 
no distinction " between what man discov- 
ers and what God reveals," he explained 
Christianity as a natural development from 
the earlier religious thought of mankind. 
It was essential to his idea of the divine 
perfection that the past should contain 
within itself all the germs of the future ; 



84 The Idea of God. 

and accordingly he attached but slight value 
to tales of miracle, and looked upon salva- 
tion as the normal ripening of the higher 
spiritual qualities of man " under the guid- 
ance of immanent Deity.' ' The views of 
Clement's disciple Origen are much like 
those of his master. Athanasius ventured 
much farther into the bewildering regions 
of metaphysics. Yet in his doctrine of the 
Trinity, by which he overcame the visible 
tendency toward polytheism in the theories 
of Arius, and averted the threatened danger 
of a compromise between Christianity and 
Paganism, he proceeded upon the lines 
which Clement had marked out. In his 
very suggestive work on " The Continuity 
of Christian Thought," Professor Alexander 
Allen thus sets forth the Athanasian point 
of view : " In the formula of Father, Son, 
and Holy Spirit, as three distinct and co- 
equal members in the one divine essence, 
there was the recognition and the recon- 
ciliation of the philosophical schools which 
had divided the ancient world. In the idea 



The Idea of God. 85 

of the eternal Father the Oriental mind 
recognized what it liked to call the profound 
abyss of being, that which lies back of* all 
phenomena, the hidden mystery which lends 
awe to human minds seeking to know the 
divine. In the doctrine of the eternal Son 
revealing the Father, immanent in nature 
and humanity as the life and light shining 
through all created things, the divine reason 
in which the human reason shares, there 
was the recognition of the truth after which 
Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics were 
struggling, — the tie which binds the cre- 
ation to God in the closest organic relation- 
ship. In the doctrine of the Holy Spirit 
the church guarded against any pantheistic 
confusion of God with the world by uphold- 
ing the life of the manifested Deity as es- 
sentially ethical or spiritual, revealing itself 
in humanity in its highest form, only in so 
far as humanity recognized its calling and 
through the Spirit entered into communion 
with the Father and the Son." 

Great as was the service which these 



86 The Idea of God. 

views of Athanasius rendered in the fourth 
century of our era, they are scarcely to be 
regarded as a permanent or essential fea- 
ture of Christian theism. The metaphysic 
in which they are couched is alien to the 
metaphysic of our time, yet through this 
vast difference it is all the more instructive 
to note how closely Athanasius approaches 
the confines of modern scientific thought, 
simply through his fundamental conception 
of God as the indwelling life of the universe. 
We shall be still more forcibly struck with 
this similarity when we come to consider 
the character impressed upon our idea of 
God by the modern doctrine of evolution. 




tt^^i^SkfS^Mp 



W^^^§^ 





VI. 

The Idea of God as remote from the World. 

UT this Greek conception of divine 
immanence did not find favour with 
the Latin-speaking world. There 
a very different notion prevailed, the ori- 
gin of which may be traced to the mental 
habits attending the primitive ancestor- 
worship. Out of materials furnished by 
the ghost-world a crude kind of monothe- 
ism could be reached by simply carrying 
back the thought to a single ghost-deity 
as the original ancestor of all the others. 
Some barbarous races have gone as far as 
this, as for example the Zulus, who have 
developed the doctrine of divine ancestors 
so far as to recognize a first ancestor, the 
Great Father, Unkulunkulu, who created 
the world. 12 The kind of theism reached 
by this process of thought differs essen- 



88 The Idea of God. 

tially from the theism reached through the 
medium of nature-worship. For whereas 
in the latter case the god of the sky or 
the sea is regarded as a mysterious spirit 
acting in and through the phenomena, in 
the former case the phenomena are re- 
garded as coerced into activity by some 
power existing outside of them, and this 
power is conceived as manlike in the crud- 
est sense, having been originally thought 
of as the ghost of some man who once 
lived upon the earth. In the monotheism 
which is reached by thinking along these 
lines of inference, the universe is con- 
ceived as an inert lifeless machine, im- 
pelled by blind forces which have been 
set acting from without ; and God is con- 
ceived as existing apart from the world in 
solitary inaccessible majesty, — " an ab- 
sentee God," as Carlyle says, "sitting idle 
ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside 
of his universe, and 'seeing it go.' " This 
conception demands less of the intellect 
than the conception of God as immanent 



The Idea of God. 89 

in the universe. It requires less grasp of 
mind and less width of experience, and it 
has accordingly been much the more com- 
mon conception. The idea of the indwell- 
ing God is an attempt to reach out toward 
the reality, and as such it taxes the pow- 
ers of the finite mind. The idea of God 
external to the universe is a symbol which 
in no wise approaches the reality, and for 
that very reason it does not tax the men- 
tal powers ; there is an aspect of finality 
about it, in which the ordinary mind rests 
content and complains of whatever seeks 
to disturb its repose. 

I must not be understood as ignoring 
the fact that this lower species of theism 
has been entertained by some of the lofti- 
est minds of our race, both in ancient and 
in modern times. When once such an 
ever-present conception as the idea of God 
has become intertwined with the whole 
body of the thoughts of mankind, it is 
very difficult for the most powerful and 
subtle intelligence to change the form it 



go The Idea of God. 

has taken. It has become so far organ- 
ized into the texture of the mind that it 
abides there unconsciously, like our funda- 
mental axioms about number and magni- 
tude ; it sways our thought hither and 
thither without our knowing it. The two 
forms of theism here contrasted have slow- 
ly grown up under the myriad unassign- 
able influences that in antiquity caused na- 
ture-worship to predominate among some 
people and ancestor-worship among oth- 
ers ; they have coloured all the philoso- 
phizing that has been done for more than 
twenty centuries ; and it is seldom that a 
thinker educated under the one form ever 
comes to adopt the other and habitually 
employ it, save under the mighty influ- 
ence of modern science, the tendency of 
which, as we shall presently see, is all in 
one direction. 

Among ancient thinkers the view of 
Deity as remote from the world prevailed 
with the followers of Epikuros, who held 
that the immortal gods could not be sup- 



The Idea of God. gi 

posed to trouble themselves about the pal- 
try affairs of men, but lived a blessed life 
of their own, undisturbed in the far-off em- 
pyrean. This left the world quite under 
the sway of blind forces, and thus we find 
it depicted in the marvellous poem of Lu- 
cretius, one of the loftiest monuments of 
Latin genius. It is to all appearance an 
atheistic world, albeit the author was per- 
haps more profoundly religious in spirit 
than any other Roman that ever lived, 
save Augustine ; yet to his immediate 
scientific purpose this atheism was no 
drawback. When we are investigating 
natural phenomena, with intent to explain 
them scientifically, our proper task is sim- 
ply to ascertain the physical conditions 
under which they occur, and the less we 
meddle with metaphysics or theology the 
better. As Laplace said, the mathema- 
tician, in solving his equations, does not 
need "the hypothesis of God." 13 To the 
scientific investigator, as such, the forces 
of nature are doubtless blind, like the x 



g2 The Idea of God. 

and y in algebra, but this is only so long 
as he contents himself with describing 
their modes of operation ; when he under- 
takes to explain them philosophically, as 
we shall see, he can in no wise dispense 
with his theistic hypothesis. The Lucre- 
tian philosophy, therefore, admirable as a 
scientific coordination of such facts about 
the physical universe as were then known, 
goes but very little way as a philosophy. 
It is interesting to note that this atheism 
followed directly from that species of the- 
ism which placed God outside of his uni- 
verse. We shall find the case of modern 
atheism to be quite similar. As soon as 
this crude and misleading conception of 
God is refuted, as the whole progress of 
scientific knowledge tends to refute it, the 
modern atheist or positivist falls back 
upon his universe of blind forces and con- 
tents himself with it, while zealously shout- 
ing from the housetops that this is the 
whole story. 

To one familiar with Christian ideas, the 



The Idea of God. g^ 

notion that Man is too insignificant a crea- 
ture to be worth the notice of Deity seems 
at once pathetic and grotesque. In the 
view of Plato, by which all Christendom 
has been powerfully influenced, there is 
profound pathos. The wickedness and 
misery of the world wrought so strongly 
upon Plato's keen sympathies and delicate 
moral sense that he came to conclusions 
almost as gloomy as those of the Buddhist 
who regards existence as an evil. In the 
Timaios he depicts the material world as 
essentially vile ; he is unable to think of 
the pure and holy Deity as manifested 
in it, and he accordingly separates the 
Creator from his creation by the whole 
breadth of infinitude. This view passed 
on to the Gnostics, for whom the puzzling 
problem of philosophy was how to explain 
the action of the spiritual God upon the 
material universe. Sometimes the inter- 
val was bridged by mediating aeons or 
emanations partly spiritual and partly ma- 
terial ; sometimes the world was held to 



g4 The Idea of God. 

be the work of the devil, and in no sense 
divine. 14 The Greek fathers under the 
lead of Clement, espousing the higher the- 
ism, kept clear of this torrent of Gnostic 
thought ; but upon Augustine it fell with 
full force, and he was carried away with 
it. In his earlier writings Augustine 
showed himself not incapable of compre- 
hending the views of Clement and Atha- 
nasius ; but his intense feeling of man's 
wickedness dragged him irresistibly in 
the opposite direction. In his doctrine 
of original sin, he represents humanity as 
cut off from all relationship with God, who 
is depicted as a crudely anthropomorphic 
Being far removed from the universe and 
accessible only through the mediating of- 
fices of an organized church. Compared 
with the thoughts of the Greek fathers 
this was a barbaric conception, but it was 
suited alike to the lower grade of culture 
in western Europe, and to the Latin po- 
litical genius, which in the decline of the 
Empire was already occupying itself with 



The Idea of God. g$ 

its great and beneficent work of construct- 
ing an imperial Church. For these rea- 
sons the Augustinian theology prevailed, 
and in the Dark Ages which followed it 
became so deeply inwrought into the in- 
nermost fibres of Latin Christianity that 
it remains dominant to-day alike in Cath- 
olic and Protestant churches. With few 
exceptions every child born of Christian 
parents in western Europe or in America 
grows up with an idea of God the outlines 
of which were engraven upon men's minds 
by Augustine fifteen centuries ago. Nay, 
more, it is hardly too much to say that 
three fourths of the body of doctrine cur- 
rently known as Christianity, unwarranted 
by Scripture and never dreamed of by 
Christ or his apostles, first took coherent 
shape in the writings of this mighty Ro- 
man, who was separated from the apostolic 
age by an interval of time like that which 
separates us from the invention of print- 
ing and the discovery of America. The 
idea of God upon which all this Augus- 



g6 The Idea of God. 

tinian doctrine is based is the idea of a 
Being actuated by human passions and 
purposes, localizable in space and utterly 
remote from that inert machine, the uni- 
verse in which we live, and upon which 
He acts intermittently through the sus- 
pension of what are called natural laws. 
So deeply has this conception penetrated 
the thought of Christendom that we con- 
tinually find it at the bottom of the spec- 
ulations and arguments of men who would 
warmly repudiate it as thus stated in its 
naked outlines. It dominates the reason- 
ings alike of believers and skeptics, of 
theists and atheists ; it underlies at once 
the objections raised by orthodoxy against 
each new step in science and the assaults 
made by materialism upon every religious 
conception of the world ; and thus it is 
chiefly responsible for that complicated 
misunderstanding which, by a lamentable 
confusion of thought, is commonly called 
" the conflict between religion and sci- 
ence. " 



VII. 

Conflict between the Two Ideas, commonly mis- 
understood as a Conflict between Religion 
and Science. 




N illustration of the mischief that 
has been wrought by the August- 
inian conception of Deity, we may 
cite the theological objections urged against 
the Newtonian theory of gravitation and 
the Darwinian theory of natural selection. 
Leibnitz, who as a mathematician but little 
inferior to Newton himself might have 
been expected to be easily convinced of the 
truth of the theory of gravitation, was 
nevertheless deterred by theological scru- 
ples from accepting it. It appeared to him 
that it substituted the action of physical 
forces for the direct action of the Deity. 
Now the fallacy of this argument of Leib- 
nitz is easy to detect. It lies in a meta- 



gS The Idea of God. 

physical misconception of the meaning of 
the word " force." "Force" is implicitly 
regarded as a sort of entity or daemon which 
has a mode of action distinguishable from 
that of Deity ; otherwise it is meaningless 
to speak of substituting the one for the 
other. But such a personification of 
"force" is a remnant of barbaric thought, 
in no wise sanctioned by physical science. 
When astronomy speaks of two planets as 
attracting each other with a " force " which 
varies directly as their masses and inversely 
as the squares of their distances apart, it 
simply uses the phrase as a convenient 
metaphor by which to describe the manner 
in which the observed movements of the 
two bodies occur. It explains that in pres- 
ence of each other the two bodies are ob- 
served to change their positions in a cer- 
tain specified way, and this is all that it 
means. This is all that a strictly scientific 
hypothesis can possibly allege, and this is 
all that observation can possibly prove. 
Whatever goes beyond this and imagines 



The Idea of God. 99 

or asserts a kind of "pull" between the 
two bodies, is not science, but metaphysics. 
An atheistic metaphysics may imagine 
such a " pull," and may interpret it as the 
action of something that is not Deity, but 
such a conclusion can find no support in 
the scientific theorem, which is simply a 
generalized description of phenomena. The 
general considerations upon which the be- 
lief in the existence and direct action of 
Deity is otherwise founded are in no wise 
disturbed by the establishment of any such 
scientific theorem. We are still perfectly 
free to maintain that it is the direct action 
of Deity which is manifested in the plan- 
etary movements ; having done nothing 
more with our Newtonian hypothesis than 
to construct a happy formula for express- 
ing the mode or order of the manifestation. 
We may have learned something new con- 
cerning the manner of divine action ; we 
certainly have not " substituted " any other 
kind of action for it. And what is thus 
obvious in this simple astronomical example 



wo The Idea of God. 

is equally true in principle in every case 
whatever in which one set of phenomena 
is interpreted by reference to another set. 
In no case whatever can science use the 
words " force" or w cause" except as meta- 
phorically descriptive of some observed or 
observable sequence of phenomena. And 
consequently at no imaginable future time, 
so long as the essential conditions of human 
thinking are maintained, can science even 
attempt to substitute the action of any 
other power for the direct action of Deity. 
The theological objection urged by Leib- 
nitz against Newton was repeated word for 
word by Agassiz in his comments upon 
Darwin. He regarded it as a fatal objec- 
tion to the Darwinian theory that it ap- 
peared to substitute the action of physical 
forces for the creative action of Deity. The 
fallacy here is precisely the same as in 
Leibnitz's argument. Mr. Darwin has 
convinced us that the existence of highly 
complicated organisms is the result of an 
infinitely diversified aggregate of circum- 



The Idea of God. 101 

stances so minute as severally to seem 
trivial or accidental ; yet the consistent 
theist will always occupy an impregnable 
position in maintaining that the entire 
series in each and every one of its incidents 
is an immediate manifestation of the crea- 
tive action of God. 

In this connection it is worth while to 
state explicitly what is the true province of 
scientific explanation. Is it not obvious 
that since a philosophical theism must re- 
gard divine power as the immediate source 
of all phenomena alike, therefore science 
cannot properly explain any particular 
group of phenomena by a direct reference 
to the action of Deity ? Such a reference 
is not an explanation, since it adds nothing 
to our previous knowledge either of the 
phenomena or of the manner of divine 
action. The business of science is simply 
to ascertain in what manner phenomena 
coexist with each other or follow each 
other, and the only kind of explanation 
with which it can properly deal is that 



102 The Idea of God. 

which refers one set of phenomena to 
another set. In pursuing this, its legiti- 
mate business, science does not touch on 
the province of theology in any way, and 
there is no conceivable occasion for any 
conflict between the two. From this and 
the previous considerations taken together 
it follows not only that such explanations 
as are contained in the Newtonian and 
Darwinian theories are entirely consistent 
with theism, but also that they are the only 
kind of explanations with which science 
can properly concern itself at all. To say 
that complex organisms were directly 
created by the Deity is to make an asser- 
tion which, however true in a theistic 
sense, is utterly barren. It is of no profit 
to theism, which must be taken for granted 
before the assertion can be made ; and it 
is of no profit to science, which must still 
ask its question, " How ? " 15 

We are now prepared to see that the the- 
ological objection urged against the New- 
tonian and Darwinian theories has its roots 



The Idea of God. 103 

in that imperfect kind of theism which 
Augustine did so much to fasten upon the 
western world. Obviously if Leibnitz and 
Agassiz had been educated in that higher 
theism shared by Clement and Athanasius 
in ancient times with Spinoza and Goethe 
in later days, — if they had been accus- 
tomed to conceive of God as immanent 
in the universe and eternally creative, — 
then the argument which they urged with 
so much feeling would never have occurred 
to them. By no possibility could such an 
argument have entered their minds. To 
conceive of " physical forces " as powers of 
which the action could in any wise be " sub- 
stituted " for the action of Deity would in 
such case have been absolutely impossible. 
Such a conception involves the idea of God 
as remote from the world and acting upon 
it from outside. The whole notion of what 
theological writers are fond of calling " sec- 
ondary causes " involves such an idea of 
God. The higher or Athanasian theism 
knows nothing of secondary causes in a 



W4 The Idea of God. 

world where every event flows directly 
from the eternal First Cause. It knows 
nothing of physical forces save as imme- 
diate manifestations of the omnipresent 
creative power of God. In the personifi- 
cation of physical forces, and the implied 
contrast between their action and that of 
Deity, there is something very like a sur- 
vival of the habits of thought which char- 
acterized ancient polytheism. What are 
these personified forces but little gods who 
are supposed to be invading the sacred 
domain of the ruler Zeus ? When one 
speaks of substituting the action of Grav- 
itation for the direct action of Deity, does 
there not hover somewhere in the dim 
background of the conception a vague 
spectre of Gravitation in the guise of a re- 
bellious Titan ? Doubtless it would not be 
easy to bring any one to acknowledge such a 
charge, but the unseen and unacknowledged 
part of a fallacy is just that which is most 
persistent and mischievous. It is not so 
many generations, after all, since our an- 



The Idea of God. 105 

cestors were barbarians and polytheists ; 
and fragments of their barbaric thinking 
are continually intruding unawares into 
the midst of our lately-acquired scientific 
culture. In most philosophical discussions 
a great deal of loose phraseology is used, in 
order to find the proper connotations of 
which we must go back to primitive and 
untutored ages. Such is eminently the 
case with the phrases in which the forces 
of nature are personified and described 
as something else than manifestations of 
omnipresent Deity. 

This subject is of such immense impor- 
tance that I must illustrate it from yet 
another point of view. We must observe 
the manner in which, along with the prog- 
ress of scientific discovery, theological ar- 
guments have come to be permeated by 
the strange assumption that the greater 
part of the universe is godless. Here again 
we must go back for a moment to the 
primeval world and observe how behind 
every physical phenomenon there were 



106 The Idea of God. 

supposed to be quasi-human passions and 
a quasi-human will. Now the phenomena 
which were first arranged and systematized 
in men's thoughts, and thus made the sub- 
ject of something like scientific generaliza- 
tion, were the simplest, the most accessible, 
and the most manageable phenomena ; and 
from these the conception of a quasi-human 
will soonest faded away. There are sav- 
ages who believe that hatchets and kettles 
have souls, but men unquestionably out- 
grew such a belief as this long before they 
outgrew the belief that there are ghost-like 
deities in the tempest, or in the sun and 
moon. After many ages of culture, men 
ceased to regard the familiar and regularly- 
recurring phenomena of nature as immedi- 
ate results of volition, and reserved this 
primeval explanation for unusual or terrible 
phenomena, such as comets and eclipses, 
or famines and plagues. As the result of 
these habits of thought, in course of time, 
Nature seemed to be divided into two an- 
tithetical provinces. On the one hand, 



The Idea of God. ioy 

there were the phenomena that occurred 
with a simple regularity which seemed to 
exclude the idea of capricious volition ; and 
these were supposed to constitute the realm 
of natural law. On the other hand, there 
were the complex and irregular phenomena 
in which the presence of law could not so 
easily be detected ; and these were sup- 
posed to constitute the realm of immediate 
divine action. This antithesis has forever 
haunted the minds of men imbued with 
the lower or Augustinian theism ; and such 
have made up the larger part of the Chris- 
tian world. It has tended to make the 
theologians hostile to science and the men 
of science hostile to theology. For as sci- 
entific generalization has steadily extended 
the region of natural law, the region which 
theology has assigned to divine action has 
steadily diminished. Every discovery in 
science has stripped off territory from the 
latter province and added it to the former. 
Every such discovery has accordingly been 
promulgated and established in the teeth 



108 The Idea of God. 

of bitter and violent opposition on the part 
of theologians. A desperate fight it has 
been for some centuries, in which science 
has won every disputed position, while 
theology, untaught by perennial defeat, 
still valiantly defends the little corner that 
is left it. Still as of old the ordinary the- 
ologian rests his case upon the assumption 
of disorder, caprice, and miraculous inter- 
ference with the course of nature. He 
naively asks, " If plants and animals have 
been naturally originated, if the world as a 
whole has been evolved and not manufac- 
tured, and if human actions conform to 
law, what is there left for God to do ? If 
not formally repudiated, is he not thrust 
back into the past eternity, as an ultimate 
source of things, which is postulated for 
form's sake, but might as well, for all 
practical purposes, be omitted ? " 16 

The scientific inquirer may reply that 
the difficulty is one which theology has 
created for itself. It is certainly not sci- 
ence that has relegated the creative activ- 



The Idea of God. log 

ity of God to some nameless moment in 
the bygone eternity and left him without 
occupation in the present world. It is not 
science that is responsible for the mis- 
chievous distinction between divine action 
and natural law. That distinction is his- 
torically derived from a loose habit of 
philosophizing characteristic of ignorant 
ages, and was bequeathed to modern times 
by the theology of the Latin church. 
Small blame to the atheist who, starting 
upon such a basis, thinks he can interpret 
the universe without the idea of God ! He 
is but doing as well as he knows how, with 
the materials given him. One has only, 
however, to adopt the higher theism of 
Clement and Athanasius, and this alleged 
antagonism between science and theology, 
by which so many hearts have been sad- 
dened, so many minds darkened, vanishes 
at once and forever. " Once really adopt 
the conception of an ever-present God, 
without whom not a sparrow falls to the 
ground, and it becomes self-evident that 
the law of gravitation is but an expression 



no The Idea of God. 

of a particular mode of divine action. And 
what is thus true of one law is true of all 
laws." 17 The thinker in whose mind divine 
action is thus identified with orderly action, 
and to whom a really irregular phenomenon 
would seem like a manifestation of sheer 
diabolism, foresees in every possible exten- 
sion of knowledge a fresh confirmation of 
his faith in God. From his point of view 
there can be no antagonism between our 
duty as inquirers and our duty as wor- 
shippers. To him no part of the universe 
is godless. In the swaying to and fro of 
molecules and the ceaseless pulsations of 
ether, in the secular shif tings of planetary 
orbits, in the busy work of frost and rain- 
drop, in the mysterious sprouting of the 
seed, in the everlasting tale of death and 
life renewed, in the dawning of the babe's 
intelligence, in the varied deeds of men 
from age to age, he finds that which awak- 
ens the soul to reverential awe ; and each 
act of scientific explanation but reveals an 
opening through which shines the glory of 
the Eternal Majesty. 



VIII. 




Anthropomorphic Conceptions of God. 

ETWEEN the two ideas of God 
which we have exhibited in such 
striking contrast, there is never- 
theless one point of resemblance ; and 
this point is fundamental, since it is the 
point in virtue of which both are entitled 
to be called theistic ideas. In both there 
is presumed to be a likeness of some sort 
between God and Man. In both there is 
an element of anthropomorphism. Even 
upon this their common ground, however, 
there is a wide difference between the two 
conceptions. In the one the anthropo- 
morphic element is gross, in the other it 
is refined and subtle. The difference is 
so far-reaching that some years ago I pro- 
posed to mark it by contrasting these two 
conceptions of God as Anthropomorphic 



U2 The Idea of God. 

Theism and Cosmic Theism. For the 
doctrine which represents God as imma- 
nent in the universe and revealing him- 
self in the orderly succession of events, 
the name Cosmic Theism is eminently 
appropriate : but it is not intended by 
the antithetic nomenclature to convey the 
impression that in cosmic theism there 
is nothing anthropomorphic. 18 A theory 
which should regard the Human Soul as 
alien and isolated in the universe, with- 
out any links uniting it with the eternal 
source of existence, would not be theism 
at all. It would be Atheism, which on 
its metaphysical side is "the denial of 
anything psychical in the universe out- 
side of human consciousness." It is far 
enough from any such doctrine to the 
cosmic theism of Clement and Origen, of 
Spinoza and Lessing and Schleiermacher. 
The difference, however, between this cos- 
mic conception of God and the anthropo- 
morphic conception held by Tertullian and 
Augustine, Calvin and Voltaire and Paley, 



The Idea of God, 113 

is sufficiently great to be described as a 
contrast. The explanation of the differ- 
ence must be sought far back in the his- 
toric genesis of the two conceptions. Cos- 
mic theism, as we have seen, was reached 
through nature-worship with its notion of 
vast elemental spirits indwelling in physi- 
cal phenomena. Anthropomorphic theism 
is descended from the notion of tutelar 
deities which was part of the primitive an- 
cestor-worship. In the process by which 
men attained to cosmic theism, physical 
generalization was the chief agency at 
work ; but into anthropomorphic theism, 
as we have seen, there entered concep- 
tions derived from men's political think- 
ing. For such a people as the Romans, 
who could deify Imperator Augustus in 
just the same way that the Japanese have 
deified their Mikado, it was natural and 
easy to conceive of God as a monarch en- 
throned in the heavens and surrounded 
by a court of ministering angels. Such 
was the popular conception in the early 



U4 The Idea of God. 

ages of Christianity, and such it has 
doubtless remained with the mass of un- 
instructed people even to this day. The 
very grotesqueness of the idea, as it ap- 
pears to the mind of a philosopher, is an 
index of the ease with which it satisfies 
the mind of an uneducated man. Many 
persons, no doubt, have entertained this 
idea of God without ever giving it very 
definite shape, and many have recognized 
it as in great measure symbolic : yet noth- 
ing can be more certain than that un- 
told thousands have conceived it in its 
full intensity of anthropomorphism. Alike 
in sermons and theological treatises, in 
stately poetry and in every-day talk, the 
Deity has been depicted as pleased or 
angry, as repenting of his own acts, as 
soothed by adulation and quick to wreak 
vengeance upon silly people for blasphe- 
mous remarks. In those curious bills of 
expenses for the mediaeval miracle-plays, 
along with charges of twopence for keep- 
ing up a "fyre at hell mouthe," we find 



The Idea of God. nj 

such items as a shilling for a purple coat 
for God. In one of these plays an angel 
who has just witnessed the crucifixion 
comes rushing into Heaven, crying, " Wake 
up, almighty Father ! Here are those 
beggarly Jews killing your son, and you 
asleep here like a drunkard ! "<* Devil take 
me if I knew anything about it ! " is the 
drowsy reply. Not the slightest irrever- 
ence was intended in these miracle-plays, 
which were the only dramatic perform- 
ances tolerated by the mediaeval church, 
for the sake of their wholesome educa- 
tional influence upon the common people. 
In the light of such facts, one sees that 
the representations of the Deity as an old 
man of august presence, with flowing hair 
and beard, by the early modern painters, 
must have meant to all save the highest 
minds much more than a mere symbol. 
Until one's thoughts have become accus- 
tomed to range far and wide over the 
universe it is doubtless impossible to 
frame a conception of Deity that is not 



/ / 6 The Idea of God. 

grossly anthropomorphic. I remember dis- 
tinctly the conception which I had formed 
when five years of age. I imagined a nar- 
row office just over the zenith, with a tall 
standing-desk running lengthwise, upon 
which lay several open ledgers bound in 
coarse leather. There was no roof over 
this office, and the walls rose scarcely five 
feet from the floor, so that a person stand- 
ing at the desk could look out upon the 
whole world. There were two persons at 
the desk, and one of them — a tall, slender 
man, of aquiline features, wearing specta- 
cles, with a pen in his hand and another 
behind his ear — was God. The other, 
whose appearance I do not distinctly re- 
call, was an attendant angel. Both were 
diligently watching the deeds of men and 
recording them in the ledgers. To my 
infant mind this picture was not grotesque, 
but ineffably solemn, and the fact that 
all my words and acts were thus written 
down, to confront me at the day of judg- 
ment, seemed naturally a matter of grave 
concern. 



The Idea of God. uj 

If we could cross-question all the men 
and women we know, and still more all 
the children, we should probably find that, 
even in this enlightened age, the concep- 
tions of Deity current throughout the civ- 
ilized world contain much that is in the 
crudest sense anthropomorphic. Such, at 
any rate, seems to be the character of the 
conceptions with which we start in life. 
With those whose studies lead them to 
ponder upon the subject in the light of 
enlarged experience, these conceptions be- 
come greatly modified. They lose their 
anthropomorphic definiteness, they grow 
vague by reason of their expansion, they 
become recognized as largely symbolic, 
but they never quite lose all traces of 
their primitive form. Indeed, as I said a 
moment ago, they cannot do so. The ut- 
ter demolition of anthropomorphism would 
be the demolition of theism. We have 
now to see what traces of its primitive 
form the idea of God can retain, in the 
light of our modern knowledge of the uni- 
verse. 



c 



IX. 




The Argument from Design. 

| HE most highly refined and scien- 
tific form of anthropomorphic the- 
ism is that which we are accus- 
tomed to associate with Paley and the 
authors of the Bridgewater treatises. It 
is not peculiar to Christianity, since it 
has been held by pagans and unbelievers 
as firmly as by the devoutest members of 
the church. The argument from design 
is as old as Sokrates, and was relied on 
by Voltaire and the English deists of the 
eighteenth century no less than by Dr. 
Chalmers and Sir Charles Bell. Upon this 
theory the universe is supposed to have 
been created by a Being possessed of intel- 
ligence and volition essentially similar to 
the intelligence and volition of Man. This 
Being is actuated by a desire for the good 



The Idea of God. ng 

of his creatures, and in pursuance thereof 
entertains purposes and adapts means to 
ends with consummate ingenuity. The 
process by which the world was created 
was analogous to manufacture, as being 
the work of an intelligent artist operating 
upon unintelligent materials objectively 
existing. It is in accordance with this 
theory that books on natural theology, as 
well as those text-books of science which 
deem it edifying to introduce theological 
reflections where they have no proper 
place, are fond of speaking of the " Divine 
Architect'' or the " Great Designer." 

This theory, which is still commonly 
held, was in high favour during the earlier 
part of the present century. In view of 
the great and sudden advances which 
physical knowledge was making, it seemed 
well worth while to consecrate science to 
the service of theology ; and at the same 
time, in emphasizing the argument from 
design, theology adopted the methods of 
science. The attempt to discover evi- 



i2o The Idea of God. 

dences of beneficent purpose in the struc- 
ture of the eye and ear, in the distribu- 
tion of plants and animals over the earth's 
surface, in the shapes of the planetary- 
orbits and the inclinations of their axes, 
or in any other of the innumerable ar- 
rangements of nature, was an attempt at 
true induction ; and high praise is due to 
the able men who have devoted their ener- 
gies to reinforcing the argument. By far 
the greater part of the evidence was natu- 
rally drawn from the organic world, which 
began to be comprehensively studied in 
the mutual relations of all its parts in the 
time of Lamarck and Cuvier. The or- 
ganic world is full of unspeakably beauti- 
ful and wonderful adaptations between or- 
ganisms and their environments, as well 
as between the various parts of the same 
organism. The unmistakable end of these 
adaptations is the welfare of the animal 
or plant ; they conduce to length and com- 
pleteness of life, to the permanence and 
prosperity of the species. For some time, 



The Idea of God. 121 

therefore, the arguments of natural the- 
ology seemed to be victorious along the 
whole line. The same kind of reasoning 
was pushed farther and farther to explain 
the classification and morphology of plants 
and animals ; until the climax was reached 
in Agassiz's remarkable " Essay on Classi- 
fication/' published in 1859, in which every 
organic form was not only regarded as a 
concrete thought of the Creator interpret- 
able by the human mind, but this kind 
of explanation was expressly urged as a 
substitute for inquiries into the physical 
causes whereby such forms might have 
been originated. 

In its best days, however, there was a 
serious weakness in the argument from 
design, which was ably pointed out by 
Mr. Mill, in an essay wherein he accords 
much more weight to the general argu- 
ment than could now by any possibility 
be granted it. Its fault was the familiar 
logical weakness of proving too much. 
The very success of the argument in 



122 The Idea of God. 

showing the world to have been the work 
of an intelligent Designer made it impos- 
sible to suppose that Creator to be at 
once omnipotent and absolutely benevo- 
lent. For nothing can be clearer than 
that Nature is full of cruelty and mal- 
adaptation. In every part of the animal 
world we find implements of torture sur- 
passing in devilisli ingenuity anything 
that was ever seen in the dungeons of the 
Inquisition. We are introduced to a 
scene of incessant and universal strife, of 
which it is not apparent on the surface 
that the outcome is the good or the hap- 
piness of anything that is sentient. In 
pre-Darwinian times, before we had gone 
below the surface, no such outcome was 
discernible. Often, indeed, we find the 
higher life wantonly sacrificed to the low. 
er, as instanced by the myriads of para- 
sites apparently created for no other pur- 
pose than to prey upon creatures better 
than themselves. Such considerations 
bring up, with renewed emphasis, the ever- 



The Idea of God. 123 

lasting problem of the origin of evil. If 
the Creator of such a world is omnipotent 
he cannot be actuated solely by a desire 
for the welfare of his creatures, but must 
have other ends in view to which this is 
in some measure subordinated. Or if he 
is absolutely benevolent, then he cannot 
be omnipotent, but there is something in 
the nature of things which sets limits to 
his creative power. This dilemma is as 
old as human thinking, and it still remains 
a stumbling-block in the way of any the- 
ory of the universe that can possibly be 
devised. But it is an obstacle especially 
formidable to any kind of anthropomor- 
phic theism. For the only avenue of es- 
cape is the assumption of an inscrutable 
mystery which would contain the solution 
of the problem if the human intellect 
could only penetrate so far; and the more 
closely we invite a comparison between 
divine and human methods of working, the 
more do we close up that only outlet. 
The practical solution oftenest adopted 



124 The Idea of Cod. 

has been that which sacrifices the Cre- 
ator's omnipotence in favour of his benev- 
olence. In the noblest of the purely 
Aryan religions — that of which the sa- 
cred literature is contained in the Zend- 
avesta — the evil spirit Ahriman exists 
independently of the will of the good 
Ormuzd, and is accountable for all the sin 
in the world, but in the fulness of time 
he is to be bound in chains and shorn of 
his power for mischief. 19 This theory has 
passed into Christendom in the form of 
Manichaeism ; but its essential features 
have been adopted by orthodox Christi- 
anity, which at the same time has tried to 
grasp the other horn of the dilemma and 
save the omnipotence of the Deity by pay- 
ing him what Mr. Mill calls the doubtful 
compliment of making him the creator of 
the devil. By this device the essential 
polytheism of the conception is thinly 
veiled. The confusion of thought has 
been persistently blinked by the popular 
mind ; but among the profoundest think- 



The Idea of God. 125 

ers of the Aryan race there have been two 
who have explicitly adopted the solution 
which limits the Creator's power. One of 
these was Plato, who held that God's per- 
fect goodness has been partially thwarted 
by the intractableness of the materials he 
has had to work with. This theory was 
carried to extremes by those Gnostics who 
believed that God's work consisted in re- 
deeming a world originally created by the 
devil, and in orthodox Christianity it gave 
rise to the Augustinian doctrine of total 
depravity, and the "philosophy of the plan 
of salvation" founded thereon. The other 
great thinker who adopted a similar solu- 
tion was Leibnitz. In his famous theory 
of optimism the world is by no means 
represented as perfect ; it is only the best 
of all possible worlds, the best the Creator 
could make out of the materials at hand. 
In recent times Mr. Mill shows a marked 
preference for this view, and one of the 
foremost religious teachers now living, 
Dr. Martineau, falls into a parallel line 



126 The Idea of God. 

of thinking in his suggestion that the 
primary qualities of matter constitute a 
"datum objective to God," who, "in shap- 
ing the orbits out of immensity, and de- 
termining seasons out of eternity, could 
but follow the laws of curvature, measure, 
and proportion." 20 

But indeed it is not necessary to refer 
to the problem of evil in order to show 
that the argument from design cannot 
prove the existence of an omnipotent and 
benevolent Designer. It is not omnipo- 
tence that contrives and plans and adapts 
means to ends. These are the methods 
of finite intelligence ; they imply the over- 
coming of obstacles ; and to ascribe them 
to omnipotence is to combine words that 
severally possess meanings into a phrase 
that has no meaning. "God said, Let 
there be light : and there was light." In 
this noble description of creative omnipo- 
tence one would search in vain for any 
hint of contrivance. The most the argu- 
ment from design could legitimately hope 



The Idea of God. 12J 

to accomplish was to make it seem prob- 
able that the universe was wrought into 
its present shape by an intelligent and be- 
nevolent Being immeasurably superior to 
Man, but far from infinite in power and 
resources. Such an argument hardly rises 
to the level of true theism. 21 




X. 



Simile of the Watch replaced by Simile of 
the Flower. 




T was in its own chosen strong- 
hold that this once famous argu- 
ment was destined to meet its 
doom. It was in the adaptations of the 
organic world, in the manifold harmonies 
between living creatures and surrounding 
circumstances, that it had seemed to find 
its chief support ; and now came the Dar- 
winian theory of natural selection, and in 
the twinkling of an eye knocked all this 
support from under it. It is not that the 
organism and its environment have been 
adapted to each other by an exercise of 
creative intelligence, but it is that the 
organism is necessarily fitted to the en- 
vironment because in the perennial slaugh- 
ter that has gone on from the beginning 



The Idea of God. 129 

only the fittest have survived. Or, as 
it has been otherwise expressed, " the 
earth is suited to its inhabitants because 
it has produced them, and only such 
as suit it live." In the struggle for ex- 
istence no individual peculiarity, however 
slight, that tends to the preservation of 
life is neglected. It is unerringly seized 
upon and propagated by natural selection, 
and from the cumulative action of such 
slight causes have come the beautiful 
adaptations of which the organic world is 
full. The demonstration of this point, 
through the labours of a whole generation 
of naturalists, has been one of the most 
notable achievements of modern science, 
and to the theistic arguments of Paley 
and the Bridgewater treatises it has dealt 
destruction. 

But the Darwinian theory of natural se- 
lection does not stand alone. It is part 
of a greater whole. It is the most con- 
spicuous portion of that doctrine of evo- 
lution in which all the results hitherto 

9 



I jo The Idea of God. 

attained by the great modern scientific 
movement are codified, and which Herbert 
Spencer had already begun to set forth 
in its main outlines before the Darwinian 
theory had been made known to the world. 
This doctrine of evolution so far extends 
the range of our vision through past and 
future time as entirely to alter our con- 
ception of the universe. Our grandfa- 
thers, in common with all preceding gen- 
erations of men, could and did suppose 
that at some particular moment in the 
past eternity the world was created in very 
much the shape which it has at present. 
But our modern knowledge does not allow 
us to suppose anything of the sort. We 
can carry back our thoughts through a 
long succession of great epochs, some of 
them many millions of years in duration, 
in each of which the innumerable forms 
of life that covered the earth were very 
different from what they were in all the 
others, and in even the nearest of which 
they were notably different from what 



The Idea of God. 131 

they are now. We can go back still far- 
ther to the eras when the earth was a 
whirling ball of vapour, or when it formed 
an equatorial belt upon a sun two hundred 
million miles in diameter, or when the 
sun itself was but a giant nebula from 
which as yet no planet had been born. 
And through all the vast sweep of time, 
from the simple primeval vapour down to 
the multifarious world we know to-day, we 
see the various forms of Nature coming 
into existence one after the other in ac- 
cordance with laws of which we are al- 
ready beginning to trace the character and 
scope. Paley's simile of the watch is no 
longer applicable to such a world as this. 
It must be replaced by the simile of the 
flower. The universe is not a machine, 
but an organism, with an indwelling prin- 
ciple of life. It was not made, but it has 
grown. 

That such a change in our conception 
of the universe marks the greatest revo- 
lution that has ever taken place in human 



1 32 The Idea, of God. 

thinking need scarcely be said. But even 
in this statement we have not quite re- 
vealed the depth of the change. Not only 
has modern science made it clear that the 
varied forms of Nature which make up the 
universe have arisen through a process of 
evolution, but it has also made it clear 
that what we call the laws of Nature have 
been evolved through the self-same pro- 
cess. The axiom of the persistence of 
force, upon which all modern science has 
come to rest, involves as a necessary cor- 
ollary the persistence of the relations be- 
tween forces ; so that, starting with the 
persistence of force and the primary qual- 
ities of matter, it can be shown that all 
those uniformities of coexistence and suc- 
cession which we call natural laws have 
arisen one after the other in connection 
with the forms which have afforded the 
occasions for their manifestation. The 
all-pervading harmony of Nature is thus 
itself a natural product, and the last inch 



The Idea, of God. 133 

of ground is cut away from under the the- 
ologians who suppose the universe to have 
come into existence through a supernat- 
ural process of manufacture at the hands 
of a Creator outside of itself. 




XL 



The Craving for a Final Cause. 




T appears, then, that the idea of 
God as remote from the world is 
not likely to survive the revolu- 
tion in thought which the rapid increase 
of modern knowledge has inaugurated. 
The knell of anthropomorphic or Augus- 
tinian theism has already sounded. This 
conclusion need not, however, disturb us 
when we consider how imperfect a form 
of theism this is which mankind is now 
outgrowing. To get rid of the appearance 
of antagonism between science and relig- 
ion will of itself be one of the greatest 
benefits ever conferred upon the human 
race. It will forward science and purify 
religion, and it will go far toward in- 
creasing kindness and mutual helpfulness 
among men. Since such happy results 



The Idea of God. 135 

are likely to follow the general adoption 
of the cosmic or Athanasian form of the- 
ism, in place of the other form, it becomes 
us to observe more specifically the manner 
in which this higher theism stands related 
to our modern knowledge. 

To every form of theism, as I have al- 
ready urged, an anthropomorphic element 
is indispensable. It is quite true, on the 
one hand, that to ascribe what we know 
as human personality to the infinite Deity 
straightway lands us in a contradiction, 
since personality without limits is incon- 
ceivable. But on the other hand, it is no 
less true that the total elimination of an- 
thropomorphism from the idea of God 
abolishes the idea itself. This difficulty 
need not dishearten us, for it is no more 
than we must expect to encounter on the 
threshold of such a problem as the one 
before us. We do not approach the ques- 
tion in the spirit of those natural theolo- 
gians who were so ready with their expla- 
nations of the divine purposes. We are 



136 The Idea of God. 

aware that "we see as through a glass 
darkly," and we do not expect to "think 
God's thoughts after him" save in the 
crudest symbolic fashion. In dealing with 
the Infinite we are confessedly treating of 
that which transcends our powers of con- 
ception. Our ability to frame ideas is 
strictly limited by experience, and our ex- 
perience does not furnish the materials for 
the idea of a personality which is not nar- 
rowly hemmed in by the inexorable bar- 
riers of circumstance. We therefore can- 
not conceive such an idea. But it does 
not follow that there is no reality answer- 
ing to what such an idea would be if it 
could be conceived. The test of incon- 
ceivability is only applicable to the world 
of phenomena from which our experience 
is gathered. It fails when applied to that 
which lies behind phenomena. I do not 
hold for this reason that we are justified 
in using such an expression as " infinite 
personality" in a philosophical inquiry 
where clearness of thought and speech is 



The Idea of God. iff 

above all things desirable. But I do hold, 
most emphatically, that we are not de- 
barred from ascribing a quasi-psychical na- 
ture to the Deity simply because we can 
frame no proper conception of such a na- 
ture as absolute and infinite. 

The point is of vital importance to the- 
ism. As Kant has well said, " the concep- 
tion of God involves not merely a blindly 
operating Nature as the eternal root of 
things, but a Supreme Being that shall be 
the author of all things by free and under- 
standing action ; and it is this conception 
which alone has any interest for us." It 
will be observed that Kant says nothing 
here about "contrivance." By the phrase 
"free and understanding action" he doubt- 
less means much the same that is here 
meant by ascribing to God a quasi-psy- 
chical nature. And thus alone, he says, 
can we feel any interest in theism. The 
thought goes deep, yet is plain enough to 
every one. The teleological instinct in 
Man cannot be suppressed or ignored. 



138 The Idea of God. 

The human soul shrinks from the thought 
that it is without kith or kin in all this 
wide universe. Our reason demands that 
there shall be a reasonableness in the con- 
stitution of things. This demand is a fact 
in our psychical nature as positive and ir- 
repressible as our acceptance of geometri- 
cal axioms and our rejection of whatever 
controverts such axioms. No ingenuity of 
argument can bring us to believe that the 
infinite Sustainer of the universe will "put 
us to permanent intellectual confusion." 
There is in every earnest thinker a crav- 
ing after a final cause ; and this craving 
can no more be extinguished than our 
belief in objective reality. Nothing can 
persuade us that the universe is a farrago 
of nonsense. Our belief in what we call 
the evidence of our senses is less strong 
than our faith that in the orderly sequence 
of events there is a meaning which our 
minds could fathom were they only vast 
enough. Doubtless in our own age, of 
which it is a most healthful symptom 
that it questions everything, there are 



The Idea of God. 1 39 

many who, through inability to assign the 
grounds for such a faith, have persuaded 
themselves that it must be a mere super- 
stition which ought not to be cherished ; 
but it is not likely that any one of these 
has ever really succeeded in ridding him- 
self of it. 

According to Mr. Spencer, the only ulti- 
mate test of reality is persistence, and the 
only measure of validity among our pri- 
mary beliefs is the success with which 
they resist all efforts to change them. Let 
us see, then, how it is with the belief in 
the essential reasonableness of the uni- 
verse. Does this belief answer to any out- 
ward reality? Is there, in the scheme of 
things, aught that justifies Man in claim- 
ing kinship of any sort with the God that 
is immanent in the world ? 

The difficulty in answering such ques- 
tions has its root in the impossibility of 
framing a representative conception of 
Deity ; but it is a difficulty which may, for 
all practical purposes, be surmounted by 
the aid of a symbolic conception. 



XII. 




Symbolic Conceptions. 

[BSERVE the meaning of this dis- 
tinction. Of any simple object 
which can be grasped in a single 
act of perception, such as a knife or a 
book, an egg or an orange, a circle or a 
triangle, you can frame a conception which 
almost or quite exactly represents the ob- 
ject. The picture or visual image in your 
mind when the orange is present to the 
senses is almost exactly reproduced when 
it is absent. The distinction between the 
two lies chiefly in the relative " vividness 
of the former as contrasted with the rela- 
tive faintness of the latter. But as the 
objects of thought increase in size and in 
complexity of detail, the case soon comes 
to be very different. You cannot frame 
a truly representative conception of the 



The Idea of God. 141 

town in which you live, however familiar 
you may be with its streets and houses, 
its parks and trees, and the looks and de- 
meanour of the townsmen ; it is impossi- 
ble to embrace so many details in a single 
mental picture. The mind must range to 
and fro among the phenomena in order 
to represent the town in a series of con- 
ceptions. But practically what you have 
in mind when you speak of the town is 
a fragmentary conception in which some 
portion of the object is represented, while 
you are well aware that with sufficient 
pains a series of mental pictures could be 
formed which would approximately corre- 
spond to the object. That is to say, this 
fragmentary conception stands in your 
mind as a symbol of the town. To some 
extent the conception is representative, 
but to a great degree it is symbolic. With 
a further increase in the size and complex- 
ity of the objects of thought, our concep- 
tions gradually lose their representative 
character, and at length become purely 



142 The Idea of God. 

symbolic. No one can form a mental 
picture that answers even approximately 
to the earth. Even a homogeneous ball 
eight thousand miles in diameter is too 
vast an object to be conceived otherwise 
than symbolically, and much more is this 
true of the ball upon which we live, with 
all its endless multiformity of detail. We 
imagine a globe and clothe it with a few 
terrestrial attributes, and in our minds 
this fragmentary notion does duty as a 
symbol of the earth. 

The case becomes still more striking 
when we have to deal with conceptions of 
the universe, of cosmic forces such as light 
and heat, or of the stupendous secular 
changes which modern science calls us to 
contemplate. Here our conceptions can- 
not even pretend to represent the objects; 
they are as purely symbolic as the alge- 
braic equations whereby the geometer ex- 
presses the shapes of curves. Yet so long 
as there are means of verification at our 
command, we can reason as safely with 



The Idea of God. 143 

these symbolic conceptions as if they were 
truly representative. The geometer can 
at any moment translate his equation into 
an actual curve, and thereby test the re- 
sults of his reasoning ; and the case is 
similar with the undulatory theory of light, 
the chemist's conception of atomicity, and 
other vast stretches of thought which in 
recent times have revolutionized our knowl- 
edge of Nature. The danger in the use 
of symbolic conceptions is the danger of 
framing illegitimate symbols that answer 
to nothing in heaven or earth, as has hap- 
pened first and last with so many short- 
lived theories in science and in meta- 
physics. Forewarned of this danger, and 
therefore — I hope — forearmed against it, 
let us see what a scientific philosophy has 
to say about the Power that is manifested 
in and through the universe. 



XIII. 




The Eternal Source of Phenomena. 

JE have seen that before men could 
arrive at the idea of God, before 
out of the old crude and fragmen- 
tary polytheisms there could be developed 
a pure and coherent theism, it was neces- 
sary that physical generalization should 
have advanced far enough to enable them, 
however imperfectly, to reason about the 
universe as a whole. It was a faint 
glimpse of the unity of Nature that first 
led men to the conception of the unity of 
God, and as their knowledge of the phe- 
nomenal fact becomes clearer, so must 
their grasp upon the noumenal truth be- 
hind it become firmer. Now the whole 
tendency of modern science is to impress 
upon us ever more forcibly the truth that 
the entire knowable universe is an im- 



The Idea of God. 145 

mense unit, animated throughout all its 
parts by a single principle of life. This 
conclusion, which was long ago borne in 
upon the minds of prophetic thinkers, like 
Spinoza and Goethe, through their keen 
appreciation of the significance of the 
physical harmonies known to them, has 
during the last fifty years received some- 
thing like a demonstration in detail. It 
is since Goethe's death, for example, that 
it has been proved that the Newtonian 
law of gravitation extends to the bodies 
which used to be called fixed stars. That 
such was the case was already much more 
than probable, but so lately as 1835 there 
were to be found writers on science, such 
as Comte, who denied that it could ever 
be proved. But a still more impressive 
illustration of the unity of Nature is fur- 
nished by the luminiferous ether, when 
considered in connection with the discov- 
ery of the correlation of forces. The fath- 
omless abysses of space can no longer be 
talked of as empty ; they are filled with 
10 



146 The Idea of God. 

a wonderful substance, unlike any of the 
forms of matter which we can weigh and 
measure. A cosmic jelly almost infinitely 
hard and elastic, it offers at the same time 
no appreciable resistance to the move- 
ments of the heavenly bodies. It is so 
sensitive that a shock in any part of it 
causes a "tremour which is felt on the 
surface of countless worlds." Radiating 
in every direction, from millions of centric 
points, run shivers of undulation mani- 
fested in endless metamorphosis as heat, 
or light, or actinism, as magnetism or elec- 
tricity. Crossing one another in every im- 
aginable way, as if all space were crowded 
with a mesh-work of nerve-threads, these 
motions go on forever in a harmony that 
nothing disturbs. Thus every part of the 
universe shares in the life of all the other 
parts, as when in the solar atmosphere, 
pulsating at its temperature of a million 
degrees Fahrenheit, a slight breeze in- 
stantly sways the needles in every com- 
pass-box on the face of the earth. 



The Idea of God. 14J 

Still further striking confirmation is 
found in the marvellous disclosures of 
spectrum analysis. To whatever part of 
the heavens we turn the telescope, armed 
with this new addition to our senses, we 
find the same chemical elements with 
which the present century has made us 
familiar upon the surface of the earth. 
From the distant worlds of Arcturus and 
the Pleiades, whence the swift ray of light 
takes many years to reach us, it brings 
the story of the hydrogen and oxygen, the 
vapour of iron or sodium, which set it in 
motion. Thus in all parts of the universe 
that have fallen within our ken we find 
a unity of chemical composition. Nebulae, 
stars, and planets are all made of the same 
materials, and on every side we behold 
them in different stages of development, 
worlds in the making : here an irregular 
nebula such as our solar system once was, 
there a nebula whose rotation has at 
length wrought it into spheroidal form ; 
here and there stars of varied colours mark- 



148 The Idea of God. 

ing different eras in chemical evolution ; 
now planets still partly incandescent like 
Saturn and Jupiter, then planets like Mars 
and the earth, with cool atmospheres and 
solid continents and vast oceans of water; 
and lastly such bodies as the moon, va- 
pourless, rigid, and cold in death. 

Still nearer do we come toward real- 
izing the unity of Nature when we recol- 
lect that the law of evolution is not only 
the same for all these various worlds, but 
is also the same throughout all other or- 
ders of phenomena. Not only in the de- 
velopment of cosmical bodies, including 
the earth, but also in the development of 
life upon the earth's surface and in the 
special development of those complex man- 
ifestations of life known as human socie- 
ties, the most general and fundamental 
features of the process are the same, so 
that it has been found possible to express 
them in a single universal formula. And 
what is most striking of all, this notable 
formula, under which Herbert Spencer 



The Idea of God. 149 

has succeeded in generalizing the phe- 
nomena of universal evolution, was derived 
from the formula under which Von Baer 
in 1829 first generalized the mode of de- 
velopment of organisms from their em- 
bryos. That a law of evolution first par- 
tially detected among the phenomena of 
the organic world should thereafter not 
only be found applicable to all other orders 
of phenomena, but should find in this ap- 
plication its first complete and coherent 
statement, is a fact of wondrous and start- 
ling significance. It means that the uni- 
verse as a whole is thrilling in every fibre 
with Life, — not, indeed, life in the usual 
restricted sense, but life in a general 
sense. The distinction, once deemed ab- 
solute, between the living and the not- 
living is converted into a relative distinc- 
tion ; and Life as manifested in the organ- 
ism is seen to be only a specialized form 
of the Universal Life. 

The conception of matter as dead or in- 
ert belongs, indeed, to an order of thought 



150 The Idea of God. 

that modern knowledge has entirely out- 
grown. If the study of physics has taught 
us anything, it is that nowhere in Nature 
is inertness or quiescence to be found. 
All is quivering with energy. From par- 
ticle to particle without cessation the 
movement passes on, reappearing from 
moment to moment under myriad Protean 
forms, while the rearrangements of parti- 
cles incidental to the movement constitute 
the qualitative differences among things. 
Now in the language of physics all mo- 
tions of matter are manifestations of 
force, to which we can assign neither be- 
ginning nor end. Matter is indestructible, 
motion is continuous, and beneath both 
these universal truths lies the fundamental 
truth that force is persistent. The far- 
thest reach in science that has ever been 
made was made when it was proved by 
Herbert Spencer that the law of universal 
evolution is a necessary consequence of 
the persistence of force. It has shown us 
that all the myriad phenomena of the uni- 



The Idea of God. 151 

verse, all its weird and subtle changes, in 
all their minuteness from moment to mo- 
ment, in all their vastness from age to 
age, are the manifestations of a single ani- 
mating principle that is both infinite and 
eternal. 

By what name, then, shall we call this 
animating principle of the universe, this 
eternal source of phenomena ? Using the 
ordinary language of physics, we have just 
been calling it Force, but such a term in no 
wise enlightens us. Taken by itself it is 
meaningless ; it acquires its meaning only 
from the relations in which it is used. It 
is a mere symbol, like the algebraic ex- 
pression which stands for a curve. Of 
what, then, is it the symbol ? 

The words which we use are so en- 
wrapped in atmospheres of subtle associa- 
tions that they are liable to sway the direc- 
tion of our thoughts in ways of which we 
are often unconscious. It is highly de- 
sirable that physics should have a word 
as thoroughly abstract, as utterly emptied 



/5-2 The Idea of God. 

of all connotations of personality, as pos- 
sible, so that it may be used like a math- 
ematical symbol. Such a word is Force. 
But what we are now dealing with is by 
no means a scientific abstraction. It is 
the most concrete and solid of realities, 
the one Reality which underlies all ap- 
pearances, and from the presence of which 
we can never escape. Suppose, then, that 
we translate our abstract terminology into 
something that is more concrete. Instead 
of the force which persists, let us speak 
of the Power which is always and every- 
where manifested in phenomena. Our 
question, then, becomes, What is this in- 
finite and eternal Power like ? What kind 
of language shall we use in describing it ? 
Can we regard it as in any wise "mate- 
rial," or can we speak of its universal and 
ceaseless activity as in any wise the work- 
ing of a " blind necessity " ? For here, at 
length, we have penetrated to the inner- 
most kernel of the problem ; and upon 
the answer must depend our mental atti- 
tude toward the mystery of existence. 



The Idea of God. 153 

The answer is that we cannot regard 
the infinite and eternal Power as in any- 
wise "material," nor can we attribute its 
workings to "blind necessity." The eter- 
nal source of phenomena is the source of 
what we see and hear and touch ; it is the 
source of what we call matter, but it can- 
not itself be material. Matter is but the 
generalized name we give to those modi- 
fications which we refer immediately to an 
unknown something outside of ourselves. 
It was long ago shown that all the quali- 
ties of matter are what the mind makes 
them, and have no existence as such apart 
from the mind. In the deepest sense all 
that we really know is mind, and as Clif- 
ford would say, what we call the material 
universe is simply an imperfect picture in 
our minds of a real universe of mind-stuff. 22 
Our own mind we know directly ; our 
neighbour's mind we know by inference; 
that which is external to both is a Power 
hidden from sense, which causes states of 
consciousness that are similar in both. 



154 The Idea of God. 

Such states of consciousness we call ma- 
terial qualities, and matter is nothing but 
the sum of such qualities. To speak of the 
hidden Power itself as " material " is there- 
fore not merely to state what is untrue, — 
it is to talk nonsense. We are bound to 
conceive of the Eternal Reality in terms 
of the only reality that we know, or else 
refrain from conceiving it under any form 
whatever. But the latter alternative is 
clearly impossible. 23 We might as well try 
to escape from the air in which we breathe 
as to expel from consciousness the Power 
which is manifested throughout what we 
call the material universe. But the only 
conclusion we can consistently hold is that 
this is the very same power " which in 
ourselves wells up under the form of con- 
sciousness." 

In the nature-worship of primitive men, 
beneath all the crudities of thought by 
which it was overlaid and obscured, there 
was thus after all an essential germ of 
truth which modern philosophy is con- 



The Idea of God. 155 

strained to recognize and reiterate. As 
the unity of Nature has come to be dem- 
onstrated, innumerable finite powers, once 
conceived as psychical and deified, have 
been generalized into a single infinite 
Power that is still thought of as psy- 
chical. From the crudest polytheism we 
have thus, by a slow evolution, arrived at 
pure monotheism, — the recognition of the 
eternal God indwelling in the universe, 
in whom we live and move and have our 
being. 

But in thus conceiving of God as psy- 
chical, as a Being with whom the human 
soul in the deepest sense owns kinship, 
we must beware of too carelessly ascrib- 
ing to Him those specialized psychical at- 
tributes characteristic of humanity, which 
one and all imply limitation and weakness. 
We must not forget the warning of the 
prophet Isaiah : " My thoughts are not 
your thoughts, neither are your ways my 
ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens 
are higher than the earth, so are my ways 



/ 56 The Idea of God. 

higher than your ways, and my thoughts 
than your thoughts/' Omniscience, for 
example, has been ascribed to God in 
every system of theism ; yet the psychical 
nature to which all events, past, present, 
and future, can be always simultaneously 
present is clearly as far removed from the 
limited and serial psychical nature of Man 
as the heavens are higher than the earth. 
We are not so presumptuous, therefore, 
as to attempt, with some theologians of 
the anthropomorphic school, to inquire mi- 
nutely into the character of the divine de- 
crees and purposes. But our task would 
be ill-performed were nothing more to be 
said about that craving after a final cause 
which we have seen to be an essential 
element in Man's religious nature. It 
remains to be shown that there is a rea- 
sonableness in the universe, that in the 
orderly sequence of events there is a mean- 
ing which appeals to our human intelli- 
gence. Without adopting Paley's method, 
which has been proved inadequate, we 



The Idea of God. 15J 

may nevertheless boldly aim at an object 
like that at which Paley aimed. Caution 
is needed, since we are dealing with a 
symbolic conception as to which the very 
point in question is whether there is any 
reality that answers to it. The problem 
is a hard one, but here we suddenly get 
powerful help from the doctrine of evolu- 
tion, and especially from that part of it 
known as the Darwinian theory. 




XIV. 



The Power that makes for Righteousness. 




LTHOUGH it was the Darwinian 
theory of natural selection which 
overthrew the argument from de- 
sign, yet — as I have argued in another 
place — when thoroughly understood it will 
be found to replace as much teleology as 
it destroys. 24 Indeed, the doctrine of evo- 
lution, in all its chapters, has a certain 
teleological aspect, although it does not 
employ those methods which in the hands 
of the champions of final causes have been 
found so misleading. The doctrine of evo- 
lution does not regard any given arrange- 
ment of things as scientifically explained 
when it is shown to subserve some good 
purpose, but it seeks its explanation in 
such antecedent conditions as may have 
been competent to bring about the ar- 



The Idea of God. 159 

rangement in question. Nevertheless, the 
doctrine of evolution is not only per- 
petually showing us the purposes which 
the arrangements of Nature subserve, 
but throughout one large section of the 
ground which it covers it points to a 
discernible dramatic tendency, a clearly- 
marked progress of events toward a mighty 
goal. Now it especially concerns us to 
note that this large section is just the 
one, and the only one, which our powers 
of imagination are able to compass. The 
astronomic story of the universe is alto- 
gether too vast for us to comprehend in 
such wise as to tell whether it shows any 
dramatic tendency or not. 25 But in the 
story of the evolution of life upon the sur- 
face of our earth, where alone we are able 
to compass the phenomena, we see all 
things working together, through count- 
less ages of toil and trouble, toward one 
glorious consummation. It is therefore a 
fair inference, though a bold one, that if 
our means of exploration were such that 



160 The Idea of God. 

we could compass the story of all the sys- 
tems of worlds that shine in the spacious 
firmament, we should be able to detect a 
similar meaning. At all events, the story 
which we can decipher is sufficiently im- 
pressive and consoling. It clothes our 
theistic belief with moral significance, re- 
veals the intense and solemn reality of 
religion, and fills the heart with tidings of 
great joy. 

The glorious consummation toward which 
organic evolution is tending is the produc- 
tion of the highest and most perfect psy- 
chical life. Already the germs of this 
conclusion existed in the Darwinian the- 
ory as originally stated, though men were 
for a time too busy with other aspects of 
the theory to pay due attention to them. 
In the natural selection of such individual 
peculiarities as conduce to the survival of 
the species, and in the evolution by this 
process of higher and higher creatures 
endowed with capacities for a richer and 
more varied life, there might have been 



The Idea of God. 161 

seen a well-marked dramatic tendency, to- 
ward the denouement of which every one 
of the myriad little acts of life and death 
during the entire series of geologic aeons 
was assisting. The whole scheme was 
teleological, and each single act of nat- 
ural selection had a teleological meaning. 
Herein lies the reason why the theory so 
quickly destroyed that of Paley. It did 
not merely refute it, but supplanted it 
with explanations which had the merit of 
being truly scientific, while at the same 
time they hit the mark at which natural 
theology had unsuccessfully aimed. 

Such was the case with the Darwinian 
theory as first announced. But since it 
has been more fully studied in its appli- 
cation to the genesis of Man, a wonderful 
flood of light has been thrown upon the 
meaning of evolution, and there appears 
a reasonableness in the universe such as 
had not appeared before. It has been 
shown that the genesis of Man was due to 
a change in the direction of the working 



1 62 The Idea of God. 

of natural selection, whereby psychical va- 
riations were selected to the neglect of 
physical variations. It has been shown 
that one chief result of this change was 
the lengthening of infancy, whereby Man 
appeared on the scene as a plastic crea- 
ture capable of unlimited psychical prog- 
ress. It has been shown that one chief 
result of the lengthening of infancy was 
the origination of the family and of human 
society endowed with rudimentary moral 
ideas and moral sentiments. It has been 
shown that through these cooperating 
processes the difference between Man and 
all lower creatures has come to be a differ- 
ence in kind transcending all other dif- 
ferences ; that his appearance upon the 
earth marked the beginning of the final 
stage in the process of development, the 
last act in the great drama of creation ; 
and that all the remaining work of evolu- 
tion must consist in the perfecting of the 
creature thus marvellously produced. It 
has been further shown that the perfect- 



The Idea of God. 163 

ing of Man consists mainly in the ever- 
increasing predominance of the life of the 
soul over the life of the body. And lastly, 
it has been shown that, whereas the ear- 
lier stages of human progress have been 
characterized by a struggle for existence 
like that through which all lower forms of 
life have been developed, nevertheless the 
action of natural selection upon Man is 
coming to an end, and his future develop- 
ment will be accomplished through the 
direct adaptation of his wonderfully plas- 
tic intelligence to the circumstances in 
which it is placed. Hence it has appeared 
that war and all forms of strife, having 
ceased to discharge their normal function, 
and having thus become unnecessary, will 
slowly die out ; 26 that the feelings and 
habits adapted to ages of strife will ulti- 
mately perish from disuse ; and that a 
stage of civilization will be reached in 
which human sympathy shall be all in all, 
and the spirit of Christ shall reign su- 
preme throughout the length and breadth 
of the earth. 



164 The Idea of God. 

These conclusions, with the grounds 
upon which they are based, have been 
succinctly set forth in my little book en- 
titled "The Destiny of Man viewed in the 
Light of his Origin." Startling as they 
may have seemed to some, they are no 
more so than many of the other truths 
which have been brought home to us dur- 
ing this unprecedented age. They are the 
fruit of a wide induction from the most 
vitally important facts which the doctrine 
of evolution has set forth ; and they may 
fairly claim recognition as an integral body 
of philosophic doctrine fit to stand the 
test of time. Here they are summarized 
as the final step in my argument concern- 
ing the true nature of theism. They add 
new meanings to the idea of God, as it is 
affected by modern knowledge, while at 
the same time they do but give articulate 
voice to time-honoured truths which it was 
feared the skepticism of our age might 
have rendered dumb and powerless. For 
if we express in its most concentrated 



The Idea of God. 165 

form the meaning of these conclusions 
regarding Man's origin and destiny, we 
find that it affords the full justification 
of the fundamental ideas and sentiments 
which have animated religion at all times. 
We see Man still the crown and glory of 
the universe and the chief object of divine 
care, yet still the lame and halting crea- 
ture, loaded with a brute-inheritance of 
original sin, whose ultimate salvation is 
slowly to be achieved through ages of 
moral discipline. We see the chief agency 
which produced him — natural selection 
which always works through strife — ceas- 
ing to operate upon him, so that, until 
human strife shall be brought to an end, 
there goes on a struggle between his 
lower and his higher impulses, in which 
the higher must finally conquer. And in 
all this we find the strongest imaginable 
incentive to right living, yet one that is 
still the same in principle with that set 
forth by the great Teacher who first 
brought men to the knowledge of the true 
God. 



1 66 The Idea of God. 

As to the conception of Deity, in the 
shape impressed upon it by our modern 
knowledge, I believe I have now said 
enough to show that it is no empty for- 
mula or metaphysical abstraction which 
we would seek to substitute for the living 
God. The infinite and eternal Power that 
is manifested in every pulsation of the uni- 
verse is none other than the living God. 
We may exhaust the resources of meta- 
physics in debating how far his nature 
may fitly be expressed in terms applicable 
to the psychical nature of Man ; such vain 
attempts will only serve to show how we 
are dealing with a theme that must ever 
transcend our finite powers of conception. 
But of some things we may feel sure. 
Humanity is not a mere local incident in 
an endless and aimless series of cosmical 
changes. The events of the universe are 
not the work of chance, neither are they 
the 'outcome of blind necessity. Practi- 
cally there is a purpose in the world 
whereof it is our highest duty to learn 



The Idea of God. i6y 

the lesson, however well or ill we may 
fare in rendering a scientific account of 
it. When from the dawn of life we see 
all things working together toward the 
evolution of the highest spiritual attri- 
butes of Man, we know, however the 
words may stumble in which we try to 
say it, that God is in the deepest sense a 
moral Being. The everlasting source of 
phenomena is none other than the infi- 
nite Power that makes for righteousness. 
Thou canst not by searching find Him 
out ; yet put thy trust in Him, and against 
thee the gates of hell shall not prevail ; for 
there is neither wisdom nor understanding 
nor counsel against the Eternal. 




NOTES. 



A. — MEDITATIONS OF A SAVAGE. 

In the presence of the great mystery of exist- 
ence, the thoughts of the untutored savage are 
not always so very unlike those of civilized men, 
as we may see from the following pathetic words 
of a Kafir, named Sekese, in conversation with a 
French traveller, M. Arbrouseille, on the subject 
of the Christian religion : — 

" Your tidings," said this uncultivated barba- 
rian, "are what I want, and I was seeking before 
I knew you, as you shall hear and judge for your- 
self. Twelve years ago I went to feed my flocks ; 
the weather was hazy. I sat down upon a rock 
and asked myself sorrowful questions ; yes, sor- 
rowful, because I was unable to answer them. 
Who has touched the stars with his hands — on 
what pillars do they rest, I asked myself. The 
waters never weary, they know no other law than 
to flow without ceasing from morning till night 
and from night till morning ; but where do they 
stop, and who makes them flow thus ? The clouds 



Notes, 169 

also come and go, and burst in water over the 
earth. Whence come they — who sends them ? 
The diviners certainly do not give us rain; for 
how could they do it ? and why do not I see them 
with my own eyes when they go up to heaven to 
fetch it ? I cannot see the wind ; but what is it ? 
who brings it, makes it blow and roar and terrify 
us ? Do I know how the corn sprouts ? Yester- 
day there was not a blade in my field, to-day I 
returned to the field and found some ; who can 
have given to the earth the wisdom and the power 
to produce it ? Then I buried my head in both 
my hands." — Cited in Picton, Mystery of Matter, 
p. 222. 

B.— THE NAME GOD. 
None of the dictionaries offer a satisfactory ex- 
planation of the word God. It was once commonly 
supposed to be related to the adjective good, but 
Grimm long ago showed that this connection is, 
to say the least, very improbable. It has also 
been sought to identify it with Persian Khodd, 
from Zend qvadata, Skr. svadata, Lat. a se datus, 
in which the idea is that of self-existence ; but this 
fanciful etymology was exploded by Aufrecht. The 
arrant guesswork of Donaldson, who would con- 
nect God with k<z\6s, and QeSs with rtfrnfu (New Cra- 
tylus, p. 710), scarcely deserves mention in these 



ijo Notes. 

days. Among the more scientific philologists of 
our time, August Fick, in treating of the " Wort- 
schatz dergermanischen Spracheinheit," simply re- 
fers God to a primitive Teutonic gutha, and says 
no more about it. (Vergl. Woerterbuch der indo- 
germanischen Sprachen, III. 107.) He is followed 
by Skeat (Etymological Dictionary, p. 238), who 
adds that there is " no connection with good" 
Eduard Miiller says : " So bedenklich die zusam- 
menstellung mit good, so fraglich ist doch auch 
noch die urverwandtschaft mit pers. Khodd gott, 
oder skr. g&dha mysterium, oder skr. guddha 
purus ; Heyne : ' als sich verhiillender, unsicht- 
barer, vgl. skr. guh fiir gudh celare.' " (Woerter- 
buch der englischen Sprache, p. 456.) 

Max Miiller has much more plausibly suggested 
that God was formerly a heathen name for the 
Deity, which passed into Christian usage, like the 
Latin Deus. (Science of Language, 6th ed. II. 
317.) Following this hint, I suggested, several 
years ago (North Amer. Review, Oct. 1869, p. 354), 
that God is probably identical with Wodan or Odin, 
the name of the great Northern deity, the chief 
object of the worship of our forefathers. This re- 
lation of an initial G to an initial W is a very com- 
mon one ; as for example Gtiillaume and William, 
guerre and war, guardian and warden, guile and 
wile. The same thing is seen in Armorican guasta 






Notes. iji 

and Ital. guastare, as compared with Lat. vastare, 
Eng. waste j and in the Eng. quick, Goth, quivs, 
Lat. vivus. In Erchempert's Historia Langobar- 
dorum, n, Pertz, III. 245, we find Ludoguicus for 
Ludovicus. Not only is this relation a common 
one, but there are plenty of specific instances of 
it in the case of Wodan. In Germany we have the 
town names of Godesberg, Gudenberg, and Godens- 
holt, all derived from Wodan. In the Westphalian 
dialect, Wednesday (" day of Wodan ") is called Go- 
denstag or Gunstag; in Nether-Rhenish, Gudens- 
tag; in Flemish, Goenstag. See Thorpe, North- 
ern Mythol. I. 229; Taylor, Words and Places, 
323 ; and cf. Grimm, Gesch. der deutschen Sprache, 
296. The Westphalian Saxons wrote both Guodan 
and Gudan. Odin was also called Godin (Laing, 
Heimskringla, I. 74), and Paulus Diaconus tells us 
that the Lombards pronounced Wodan as Guodan. 
In view of such a convergence of proofs, I am sur- 
prised that attention was not long ago called to 
this etymology. 

Wodan was originally the storm-spirit or animat- 
ing genius of the wind, answering in many re- 
spects to the Greek Hermes and the Vedic Sara- 
meyas. See my Myths and Myth-makers, 19, 20, 
32, 35, 67, 124, 204; and cf. Mackay, Religious 
Development of the Greeks and Hebrews, i. 260- 
273- 



REFERENCES. 



M. M., Myths and Myth-makers, 1872; C. P., Outlines of Cosmic 
Philosophy, 1874; U. W., The Unseen World, 1876; D., Dar- 
winism and Other Essays, 1879; E. E., Excursions r of an Evo- 
lutionist, 1884; D. M., The Destiny of Man, 1884; A. P. I., 
American Political Ideas, 1885. 

i. E. E. 56-77. 

2. C. P. i. 230. 

3. C P. i. 157, 177-179- 

4. M. M. 18-21, et passim. 

5. M. M. 220. 

6. M. M. 232. 

7. M. M. 236; E. E, 251. 

8. A. P. I. 78, 81. 

9. U. W. 10. 

10. D. M. 104-107. 

11. E. E. 262. 

12. M. M. 236. 

13. C. P. ii. 383. 

14. U. W. 118. 

15. D. 5-8; C. P. ii. 283. 
16, 17. C. P. ii. 428. 

18. C. P. i. 183; ii. 449. 



References. 

19. M. M. 122. 

20. C. P. ii. 405. 

21. C. P. ii. 381-410. 

22. E. E. 327-336. 

23. C. P. ii. 449. 

24. D. M. 113 ; cf. C. P. ii. 406. 

25. D. 103. 

26. D. M. 77-95; A. P. I. 101-152. 



173 




IMPORTANT BOOKS 

BY 

JOHN FISKE. 



OUTLINES OF COSMIC PHILOSOPHY, based on the Doc- 
trine of Evolution. With Criticisms on the Positive 
Philosophy. 2 vols. 8vo, pp. 465, 523, $6.00. 
Mr. Darwin, after reading this work, wrote as follows 

to Mr. Fiske : — 

"You must allow me to thank you for the very great interest 
with which I have at last slowly read the whole of your work. . . . 
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as you are ; and I think that I understand nearly the whole, though 
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parts. It is hopeless to attempt out of so much to specify what 
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It pleased me to find that here and there I had arrived, from my 
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This work of Mr. Fiske 's may be not unfairly designated the most 
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He recognizes Mr. Spencer as his teacher and guide ; but he has 
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MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS: Old Tales and Su- 
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THE UNSEEN WORLD, AND OTHER ESSAYS. 12mo, 

pp. 349, $2.00. 

Contents : The Unseen World ; The To-morrow of 
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— Applet Otis' 1 Journal. 



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... He has already achieved a place as wholly his own as it is 
eminent, — Atlantic Monthly. 



EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST. 12mo, pp. 379, 
$2.00. 
Contents: Europe before the Arrival of Man; The 
Arrival of Man in Europe ; Our Aryan Forefathers ; 
What we learn from Old Aryan Words ; Was there a 
Primeval Mother-Tongue 1 Sociology and Hero-Wor- 



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favorite subject of evolution. . . . They are well worth reperusal 
— The Nation (New York). 

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THE DESTINY OF MAN, viewed in the Light of his 
Origin. 16mo, pp. 121, $1.00. 

Contents : Man's Place in Nature as affected by the 
Copernican Theory ; As affected by Darwinism ; On the 
Earth there will never be a Higher Creature than Man ; 
The Origin of Infancy ; The Dawning of Consciousness ; 
Lengthening of Infancy and Concomitant Increase of 
Brain Surface ; Change in the Direction of the Working 
of Natural Selection ; Growing Predominance of the Psy- 
chical Life ; The Origins of Society and Morality ; Im- 
provableness of Man; Universal Warfare of Primeval 
Men ; First checked by the Beginnings of Industrial Civ- 
ilization ; Methods of Political Development and Elimina- 
tion of Warfare ; End of the Working of Natural Selec- 
tion upon Man ; Throwing off the Brute-Inheritance ; 
The Message of Christianity ; The Question as to a 
Future Life. 

Mr. Fiske has long held rank as one of the most profound aud ex- 
act of Americas thinkers, and his little monograph will serve to 
extend that deserved lame among a class of readers who are not or- 
dinarily interested in the literature of science. Mr. Fiske 's book is, 
in a word, a plea for faith in the immortality of man, based on the 
doctrine of evolution. With a superb command of all the knowl- 
edge bearing upon the philosophy of Darwinism, to which he has 
himself been a noteworthy contributor, Mr. Fiske sums up in elo- 
quent periods the process of evolutionary creation from the origin 
of infancy to the beginnings of industrial and political development 
which have made human society what it is to-day ; and then, look- 
ing into the future, he foretells how natural selection, working on 
the lines already marked out, shall attain its perfect work. The 
whole argument, or rather exposition, is a marvel of condensation. 
— Boston Traveller. 



Mr. Fiske has given us in his " Destiny of Man " a most attract 
ive condensation of his views as expressed in his various otheu 
works. One is charmed by the directness and clearness of his style, 
his simple and pure English, and his evident knowledge of his sub- 
ject. ... Of one thing we may be sure, that none are leading us 
more surely or rapidly to the full truth than men like the author 
of this little book, who reverently study the works of God for the 
lessons which he would teach his children. — Christian Union (New 
York). 

Professor Fiske is always interesting. His exposition, step by 
step, of the doctrine of evolution, is admirably adapted for those 
prejudiced against it to read — simple, pleasant, and clear, and ex- 
pressly designed to disarm hostility by showing that it is by no 
means absolutely incompatible with accepted religious beliefs — at 
least, with their essential qualities. — Overland Monthly (San Fran- 
cisco). 

It is a remarkable contribution to the literature of religious 
thought. ... It will prove that evolution is at least not irreverent. 
... It is packed full of learning and suggestion, in a style at once 
simple and beautiful, and is worth a dozen volumes of ordinary 
sermons. — Philadelphia Press. 

This essay will and should attract wide attention, founded as it is 
upon modern science and marking the way in an advanced path in 
religio-scientific inquiry. Mr. Fiske is acknowledged one of the 
first of scientific thinkers, and his conclusions have more than the 
usual weight. — Albany Journal. 

His little volume will be highl} r prized by those who enjoy seeing 
one of the most profound themes which can occupy the attention 
treated with eloquence and strength, with scientific insight and im- 
aginative vigor. — Buffalo Commercial Advertiser. 

The reverent spirit of the book, the wide range of illustrations, 
the remarkable lucidity of thought and style, and the noble elo- 
quence that characterizes it, render this book one of striking value 
and interest. — Salem Gazette. 

THE IDEA OF GOD AS AFFECTED BY MODERN 

KNOWLEDGE. 16mo, $1.00. 

This essay is a sequel to " The Destiny of Man." Its object is to 
show that the indications of Science and Philosophy are theistic, 
not atheistic ; that while the idea of God has been greatly modified 
by modern knowledge, it has not been lost or belittled, but magni- 
fied and illuminated. The essay is prefaced by a long Introduction 
of remarkable interest, and the whole book is full of significance 
and charm for all thoughtful minds. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Publishers, Boston. 



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